Hello! I'm Sam, a video game programmer with 5 years of industry experience and multiple shipped titles across a variety of platforms. I specialise in gameplay programming and making features as juicy as I can, but I've also done plenty of optimization, porting, network, and tooling work throughout my career. Scroll down to find out what I've been up to!
"I was pretty sure Sam would be a good programmer when he aced a programming test I had made to help with recruitment - and then asked what he could have done better... and I've never for one second had to question my initial assessment.
There are only 3 programmers on our team and I am always amazed at how much we've managed to accomplish between us - to make this happen we have all had to wear lots of programming hats and Sam has dealt admirably well with this. He's been involved with everything from console specific profiling & optimisation of game and rendering code, through complex mathsy physics code and animation, right into the character interaction code and other core gameplay guts of the game.
Honestly, if I was starting a company and had money to hire a programmer Sam would be right in there at the top of my hit list and I can't really offer any higher praise than that."
Alex Darby, Darbotron (Founder)
Tron: Catalyst
Tron Catalyst is a top-down roguelike RPG set in the world of Tron. While at Bithell Games I worked on the project for several years and contributed extensively to just about every part of it, including combat, vehicle AI, dialogue, interaction, player controller logic, and editor tooling.
Releases June 17 on PC, PS5, Xbox and Switch!
Tron: Identity
A visual novel for the Switch and PC/Mac set in the Tron universe made in Unity. My time on the project was spent optimising the game for the Switch, fixing bugs, and developing core gameplay systems.
Missile Command
A remake of the classic game made for the Amico Intellivision. I worked on various bug fixing and controller input tasks. Check out footage of the game at the link below.
Online Multiplayer Unreal Engine Game (Cancelled)
For about 2 years, while I was working at Stainless Games, I worked alongside Amazon Game Studios on multiplayer network code in Unreal Engine, and helped maintain builds for multiple modern consoles and mobile platforms.
Mashed Clone
The PS2 game "Mashed!" is a personal favourite of mine, so for a local game jam I tried recreating it, but with more vehicles - lots more vehicles! Runs in a browser, source code is available on Github.
Quack Runner
A stylised infinite runner for GGJ 2020. Playable in a browser.
Language warning - some of the ducks are a bit foul mouthed.
3D Modelling
When I'm not programming, I love modelling things in Blender. Check out a small collection of my work on Artstation.