jrandallfarmer@gmail.com * 903-631-9078 * 191 CR 4682 * Carthage, TX 75633
Resume:  Word PDF Text Internship Letter of Recommendation: Word PDF Text Brothers in Arms Letter of Recommendation: Word PDF Text
Game Experience & Team Accomplishments
		Unannounced Title -- Gearbox Software          October - November 2008  Programmer Unreal Engine® 3 / Third-Person Shooter Implemented waypoint navigation scripting system for pathfinding middleware (in 2.5 weeks) Added new editor mode for quickly placing waypoints and associating them with a route All waypoints in the route move when the route actor is moved The waypoint actors are hidden in the editor unless the route is selected, to reduce clutter Draws routes with data-defined line colors representing route navigation properties Added Kismet action for assigning routes to pawns Added Kismet event that activates when a pawn arrives at a waypoint Authored full usage documentation (with screenshots) for designers Prototyped enemy pawn that dynamically creates a shield (from a mesh reference) that drops on death A handful of small AI-related tasks Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway -- Gearbox Software          March 2007 - October 2008  Programmer Unreal Engine® 3 / Tactical First-Person Shooter Tackled a wide variety of tasks and bugs from AI and Gameplay to Rendering and Physics Created Wiretech system that allows designers to place and link wire terminal actors in the editor to automatically generate static meshes that use vertex factories in-game to draw cheap billboarded wires; this system has since been integrated into other Gearbox projects, such as Borderlands Created FiringBehavior system to allow designers to assign conditional bullet distribution patterns to weapons, e.g. strafing the ground to an exposed target, or a cone of accuracy that shrinks per shot Myriad small jobs such as maintaining and optimizing vehicle physics assets, creating a socket-based context-use system for placing satchel charges, and adding Kismet sequence nodes Used open-source Nullsoft Scriptable Installer System (in conjunction with Gearbox’s automated build system) to create and automate a system for building the localized PC installer for the game; this system has since been integrated into other Gearbox projects, such as Aliens: Colonial Marines Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway -- Gearbox Software          July - September 2006  Programmer (Intern) Unreal Engine® 3 / Tactical First-Person Shooter Designed and implemented interface for drawing navigation meshes in Unreal Engine® 3 editor Supported merging/splitting polygons and edges and full transaction undo for all activities Supplied designer-oriented error detection/reporting and usage documentation Debugged, augmented, and documented weapon accuracy system Letter of recommendation from supervisor states, “For all intents and purposes, we considered James as a full-time member of our team and would recommend him for future assignments.” Toybox Heroes -- The Guildhall at SMU             October 2006 - March 2007  Programmer Half Life® 2 / Two-Player Melee Fighting Game Winner 2008 IGF Showcase: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19586 Six-month project with fourteen developers: six designers, three artists, and five programmers Implemented animation-collision-based “wysiwyg” melee fighting system Implemented data-driven weapons system to empower designers to make a wide variety of weapons Implemented auto-aim cone and trajectory-calculation for thrown and ballistic weapons Element -- The Guildhall at SMU                      April - June 2005 Programmer Unreal Tournament® 2004 / Multiplayer First-Person Shooter Three-month project with twelve developers: five designers, three artists, and four programmers Added damage multiplier display over heads of damaged enemies in the game Implemented particle effects for area-of-effect attack Implemented bombs that stuck to anything in the level, including players and level BSP Developed novel solution to “shake off” bombs stuck to the player by quickly rotating the view frustum back and forth. (A register compares the sampled difference in rotation to a threshold) Extreme Escargot -- The Guildhall at SMU           July - September 2005 Sole Programmer & Designer Win32 / Action Game Sprite animation / Alpha blitting Tiled graphics and tile collision Parallax scrolling Sound effects and music Avatar is free body in 2D space affected by gravity, moved by dragging the mouse cursor; direction dragged determines thrust normal; distance dragged determines thrust power X-Ikonos -- The Guildhall at SMU                April - June 2006 Programmer Win32 / Turn-Based-Real-Time-Hybrid Strategy Game Implemented AI for single-player version Developed lightweight, generic template for genetic searches Used real-time genetic search to calculate unit movement
Game Technology
		Researching Pattern Recognition - The Guildhall at SMU            October 2006 - March 2007 Sole Programmer & Designer Half Life® 2 / Single-Player Hide and Seek Game Hides a goal using multiple strategies Average number of nodes searched to find the goal is expected to increase with respect to degree to which the graph is trained to player’s activities Dual-API 3D Rendering Framework - The Guildhall at SMU           October 2005 - June 2006 Sole Programmer Win32 / Transparently uses OpenGL or Microsoft® DirectX® 9 Imports Autodesk® 3ds Max® models and animations Imports Quake® BSP levels (Geometry, Textures, Lightmaps, Precomputed Visibility Set: List of which sections are visible from the currently-occupied section) Generates terrain from a heightmap and renders with level of detail Displays text with bitmap fonts Produces simple particle effects with physics (Spring-Mass-Damper; Particle-Particle Collision) Uses vertex and fragment programs on the GPU (Normal-Mapping, Specular Highlights, etc.)
Education
		The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University - Plano, TX   March 2007 Certificate in Digital Game Development Specialization in Software Development
Related Experience
	Marshall Computer Connection - Marshall, TX                                   1999 - 2005 Lead Technician / Technical Manager Internet Service Provider and Computer Repair Managed ISP office; arbitrated customer satisfaction; managed a few other repair technicians Charged with solving a wide range of problems from designing wireless networking modules to troubleshooting Cisco routers to writing troubleshooting guides for computer repair
Skills & Hobbies
Proficient: C / C++ (Object-Oriented Programming, Templates, STL); Perforce®; Unreal Engine® 3.0; UnrealScript®; Adobe Photoshop® (for screenshots, diagramming, and texture debugging) Have Used: Perl; HLSL; OGL Fragment ASM Shaders; Java / J2ME; Visual Basic; SQL; PHP; Linux; Valve Source®; DirectX® 9; OpenGL; FMOD (Audio); Subversion & Tortoise SVN; 3DS Max® Neural Networks; Genetic Search; A* (A-Star) Pathfinding; Relational Database Basic Algebra, Trigonometry, Geometry, and Technical Physics Excellent English Comprehension and Composition Basic Spoken Japanese Language and Familiarity with Hiragana, Katakana, and Several Kanji Fun Fact: Logged 500 - 1000 hours between Morrowind and Oblivion in Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls series Favorite Anime: Death Note; Code Geass; Full Metal Alchemist

  © 2006 James Farmer and The Guildhall at SMU All Rights Reserved