My Professional Motivations, Qualifications, and Role Preferences " The blog at the bottom of the sea

My name is Alan Wolfe, and I’m a game and engine programmer with over 25 years of experience. I’m also a graphics researcher with patents, published papers, book chapters, and conference presentations. Lastly, I am the creator of the open-source rapid graphics R&D platform, Gigi (https://github.com/electronicarts/gigi), which demonstrates the future of real time render pipelines by enabling graphics programming at the speed of thought.

I’m currently exploring new opportunities and looking for the following roles:

A Game or Game Engine Team – making a specific title. (Gameplay, engine, graphics, … )

A Shared Engine Team – supporting multiple titles or commercial customers.

Game Dev or Graphics Research – or research in similar topics.

Continuing Gigi Development – towards aligned business goals.

Related Technology – working on technology that enables game development or graphics practitioners.

The ideal position is remote, as I’m not looking to relocate, but Orange County, CA roles could work as well. My resume is at https://demofox.org/Resume.pdf

I am motivated by:

The creativity of making games, and the technical challenges that come with making them work.

Searching for creative solutions to unsolved problems and pushing forward human knowledge, while also sharing rarely known but useful bits of knowledge with others and helping them understand and apply it.

Enabling others to achieve more with less time and effort.

The three sections below go into the details of each area of specialty.

Game, Engine & Real Time Rendering Programmer

I originally started programming to turn creative writing into interactive experiences, but found game development itself to be a very wide and deep field, with many wide and deep sub-fields. Over the years I’ve been a generalist, and have also been a specialist in several areas. The fields I’ve specialized in are:

Rendering – I was one of two rendering engineers while on Diablo 4, I did some graphics work on Starcraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm. At Blizzard I was tasked with making a rendering solution for a company wide shared engine which could support any game genre on any platform. That led to Gigi. While at NVIDIA, I made the RTXGI UE plugin. I have also been a graphics researcher for the last 5 years and am known in the industry as "the blue noise guy". My graphics research has ended up in several games withing and outside of EA, and is also found in the Unreal Engine, including as part of Lumen, where you can see them showcase it as part of the explanation of how their technology works.

Audio Programming – One of my duties on Starcraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm was audio programming. This involved both gameplay level audio features, but also lower level debugging, and writing custom DSPs. A limiter and compressor I wrote that works in dB space and has quick attack times was adopted widely across the company for other games as well. Audio (and making music!) is my second love behind graphics, but it doesn’t get as much time dedicated to it.

Skeletal Animation – I was the animation programmer on a canceled open world Midway game "This is Vegas", and also on the shipped monolith game "Gotham City Impostors"

Online Engineering – Having games talk to web services / databases for things like community challenges and user generated content. I have written the servers for these on a few occasions, and I have also done some basic network programming. I’m comfortable writing TCP/IP servers and clients, and can do UDP if pressed!

As a generalist, I’ve of course done extensive work debugging, profiling and optimizing, and in crafting "right sized" systems for problems, innovating algorithmically when appropriate, and keeping it dead simple when that was the best solution. I can read and write assembly, though reading is easier.

I’ve found that every game genre has a "secret sauce" and have worked on FPSs, RTSs, MOBAs, open world streaming games, physics based games, dungeon crawlers, metroidvanias, web games, mobile "idle" games, and games with user generated content. I find peer to peer deterministic simulation to be extremely interesting, and enjoyed working in that environment while working on Stracraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm.

I tend to enjoy small teams over big ones because it’s easier to move faster and "do the right things" without getting caught up in meetings or process. No one can do everything on their own, though, and reasonable timeframes necessitate parallelizing work, so there is a balance. I’ve also been the lead of small teams, and can lead when it makes sense, but prefer to be hands on and doing work, rather than being focused on management duties. I am also happy to mentor people and over the last 5 years at EA have mentored ~10 people in graphics, while also mentoring a couple people outside of work as well.

Machine learning is the...