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Professional Career

The materials collected on this page provide a brief chronological look at my 8 years of professional history in the video game industry.

More details are available on my résumé, or you can contact me directly via e-mail.

Click here to see a list of some of my technical skills.




Koolhaus Games

      From January 2009 to early 2010 I developed games for Koolhaus Games in Vancouver, Canada, shipping titles for DS, Wii, and iPhone.



      Imp: Surf The Music is an original IP available now on the App Store. Imp was uniquely designed for the iPhone hardware, utilizing motion-based input and 3D graphics. Imp also boasts an original soundtrack and puts a new twist on the music-game genre, separating it from the endless fields of Parappa the Rappa (and Guitar Hero) clones out there.



      Big League Sports: Summer was a great exercise in character building, and gave me a chance to get back to my roots designing and programming touch-based minigames. I also assisted in the development of the Wii SKU which used a ported version of the pinball game I designed for the DS.



Aloha Island

     

After moving to Honolulu I learned of a small game dev near campus called Aloha Island that had been given a grant to develop edutainment games for the Nintendo DS. The intent was to create a game that would teach vocabulary and grammar to grade school kids. This was an intriguing idea and I joined their team as a tester.

The final result was Cosmos Chaos, an epic role-playing adventure that gave me a taste of that serious gaming thing I've been hearing about.




Maui High Performance Computing Center

      During my first year of school in Hawai'i I beat out applicants from all 10 UH campuses to be awarded a U.S. Department of Defense paid internship at their supercomputing facility on the island of Maui.

My chosen field of apprenticeship was 3D Visualization, which ended up meaning Maya and Java3D. You can see the demo videos I created for my final presentation here (15sec, 2.0MB) and here (1min 8sec, 4.4MB), but please don't laugh at my animated programmer art. Programmers are very sensitive about their art.

Unfortunately I didn't get to work directly with the 11th fastest computer in the world, but I was able to explore some extremely high-tech facilities!




Incredible Technologies

      At 19 years old I was offered my first shot at professional game programming by Incredible Technologies, the largest designer and manufacturer of coin-operated video games in the United States. As a noob I was always learning on the job, but with my ability to learn quickly and think on my toes I fit in well with the extraordinary group of innovative developers around me.



AMOA Innovator Award (2004)
      Golden Tee is IT's flagship franchise and the most successful coin-operated amusement game in history. I was part of a small team tasked with architecting the next-generation arcade platform for Golden Tee with enhanced 3D graphics and wireless networking.

I am quoted describing some of my work on this game, including my custom 3ds Max particle system design tool, in the book "Deconstructing Golden Tee Live" by Joe Kraynak. Click here to see scans from the book.




Play Meter Magazine's
Game of the Year (2005)
      Silver Strike Bowling runs on the same custom Linux operating system that our team architected for Golden Tee Live. I was also responsible for maintaining custom 3ds Max tools on this project.



      My first programming job in the game industry was to design and program games for the Touch-IT countertop touchscreen platform. Click here to see an article about Touch-IT from Vending Times magazine.



Midway Games

      Unless you count my job behind the redemption counter at a Capcom-owned arcade, my first industry job was as an assistant technician in Midway's video prototype lab (which is a fancy way of saying I was a slave to their hardware engineers for two summers).

In my regular duties I assisted with the development of major franchises Cruis'n, NFL Blitz, TouchMaster and others by repairing arcade machines, building wiring harnesses, burning EPROMS, testing video monitors, setting up factory assembly lines, and doing anything else that was required of me.

At Midway I witnessed first hand how a major game studio functions day-to-day and I worked around some of the industry's most brilliant and creative minds. Some of my other noteworthy accomplishments include logging over 1000 miles on the cafeteria's Rush 2049 machine and battling on the very first networked Mortal Kombat arcade machine.



Technical Skills

The following is an abridged list of tools and libraries that I use regularly for game development and asset management:

3ds Max

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3ds Max is a highly customizable 3D modeling and rendering tool. Read about my professional work with 3ds Max in the book "Deconstructing Golden Tee Live" by clicking here.

ActionScript 3.0

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ActionScript 3.0 is the object-oriented programming language that powers dynamic interactive 2D and 3D Flash applications. Check out some of my AS3 projects on the demos page.

Blender

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Blender is an open source 3D content creation tool available for all major operating systems, and it only took me 2 hours to make this: pew pew pew!

Cocoa

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Cocoa is Apple's native environment for Mac OSX and iPhone OS, which I have used extensively to create interesting GUIs for iPhone games. My finest example yet will soon be released by Electronic Arts, so stay tuned!

Doxygen

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Doxygen generates highly configurable web documentation for software projects. Using Doxygen forces developers to consistently document their code, automatically creates graphical views of class hierarchies and is an invaluable software engineering tool. You can browse my QBlock API to see an example.

GIMP

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The GNU Image Manipulation Program is an open source cross-platform image editor that makes the greatest programmer art you've ever seen. I've been using the GIMP for nearly a decade and the Refuge Zero logo is the latest example of my work.

Linux

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Linux was my OS of choice for nearly a decade before I switched to Mac OSX, which is actually based on Unix and runs almost all of my previous Linux apps. (Thanks, MacPorts!) I also administered and helped design a custom Linux distro for the Golden Tee Golf networked arcade platform.

Lua

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Lua is a powerful, light-weight, embeddable scripting language. Lua is used in my game demos for asset and configuration management and level scripting.

Maya

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Maya is a High-end 3D modeling software package with its own scriptable API. I apprenticed in Maya and Java3D during my MHPCC internship.

Mono

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The Mono project exposes the power of C# and Microsoft's .NET framework to the world, and is yet another excellent tool for cross-platform development.

OpenGL

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OpenGL is the game industry's most widely used graphics API. I have been writing GL code since 1999 and I've implemented GL applications for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and iPhone as well as several GL-based game engines, including my own QBlock engine.

SDL

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The extraordinarily cross-platform Simple DirectMedia Library sits at the core of my QBlock engine. With the support of a large suite of libraries for managing input devices, fonts, images, audio and more, SDL is an extremely low cost middleware solution for indie developers.

Subversion

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Subversion is a popular open source cross-platform version control system that is a bit faster and more robust than CVS. The source to my QBlock engine is publically available on SourceForge.net's subversion servers.

TCL

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The Tool Command Language is incredibly useful for a myriad of tasks, and I am especially fond of writing web-enabled Eggdrop scripts for IRC, with more than a dozen scripts to my credit providing IRC users with access to sports stats and scores, weather forecasts, a Japanese to English dictionary, and much more.

Unity

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The Unity Engine is quickly becoming the game engine of choice for web and iPhone game developers, and if you've ever used it then you know why! It's busting at the seams with features, the IDE is easy and fun to use, and it can deploy to nearly any platform including Windows, OSX, Web, or iPhone in a single click of a button.

wxWidgets

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wxWidgets is an open source toolkit for implementing native GUI widgets on any OS with a single codebase. My QModelViewer tool uses wxWidgets for cross-platform file dialogs, which any UI programmer would agree is an incredibly handy feature.

Xcode

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As an iPhone developer I am extremely familiar with Apple's Xcode IDE and its fantastic set of debugging and profiling tools. Although I prefer to develop all of my software in XCode I am also familiar with Visual Studio, Eclipse, Anjuta and KDevelop IDEs.
Copyright © 2006-2010 Jeremy Glazman