James Keats
Game Programmer
Portfolio
Destiny 2 is an online shared-world first-person shooter. It was (and is) primary developed by Bungie. As a Junior Software Engineer at VV, I worked on a collaborative, high-caliber team helping Bungie to expand the Destiny franchise.
My focuses included:
- UI engineering, helping to ensure content creators had all the tools they needed to make engaging, intuitive, and gorgeous UI
- Assisting making changes to the base game that were required to ship Destiny Guardians, a version of Destiny 2 for the South Korean market
re[Mod] is a multiplayer on-the-fly weapon-building arena first-person shooter brought from an initial concept to a pre-production vertical slice in 12 weeks. Modify your weapon on-the-fly to become the strongest player and dominate the arena in this networked, 6-player experience.
My focuses included:
- Implementing gameplay mechanics, systems and networking
- Code architecture and documentation
- Designing a design and art pipeline compatible with rapid iteration
A semester-long VR project with the largest team I've worked with. In Eos, you create a solar system from scratch, and are able to explore and interact with it from the scale of a sun down to the size of a creature on each planet you create.
My focuses included:
- Overall architecture of the codebase
- Creating Unity Editor tools for the two designers
- Implementing about half of the gameplay mechanics and systems
- Implementing visual effects with the artists
Less of a game and more of a tech demo, this downloadable piece is an interactive demonstration of my interpretation of Context Behaviors as described by Andrew Frey. This was part of the AI "research" project, where we were able to dive into any topic in game AI, whether we had covered it in class or not, and create a demo. I chose to look deeper into Steering Behaviors and alternatives to Steering, and found this really cool topic that I am looking forward to using in a real game project.
A joint project between Champlain College's Emergent Media Center and the Burlington International Airport. Developed in Unity with the Xbox Kinect 2.0. This interactive experience is designed to be approachable and inviting to anyone passing through the airport, and is on display as a semi-permanent art installation in the North concourse of BTV.
My focuses included:
- All gameplay and AI programming
- Implementing and documenting Unity Editor tools for future teams
- Assisting the two artists in implementing 3D assets and animations