Craig Yates

craig.m.yates@gmail.com

About

Freelance programmer specialising in developing games on Unity engine.

• Interested in low-level performance optimisation; want to continue learning in this area.
• Frequently collaborate with designers to build useful tools.
• Enjoy assisting others and sharing knowledge.
• Generalist with skills in 3D art and music.
• Currently based in Royal Leamington Spa, UK.

Projects

Unannounced Project

2022 (Upcoming) | iOS, Android | Unity | ustwo games

Starship Troopers - Terran Command

2021 (Upcoming) | PC | Unity | Artistocrats, Slitherine
Scope changes greatly increased the performance requirements on this real-time strategy game, necessitating significant optimisation work. I primarily focused on rewriting and optimising bottleneck systems, using Unity's multithreaded job system and Burst compiler.

• Parallelised target selection, projectile collision, line-of-fire, fog of war and pathfinding systems.
• Implemented Jump Point Search optimisation for units with uniform-cost pathfinding.
• Optimised third-party decal projector plugin.

Table Manners

2020 | PC | Unity | Echo Chamber Games, Curve Digital

• Wrote environmental system to simulate heat transfer, fire propagation and other object properties.
• Optimised integration of fluid simulation plugin.
• Bug fixing and optimisation.

Manifold Garden

2019 | PC, iOS | Unity | William Chyr Studio
Joined project 2 months before release to assist with bug-fixing and polishing, subsequently took on more performance optimization tasks to support later console releases.

• Wrote occlusion culling system for recursive portal rendering.
• Implemented custom instanced LOD system built on top of BatchRendererGroup API.
• Improved infrastructure for automated performance testing.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realm War

2018 | iOS, Android | Unity, GameSparks | Pixel Toys

• Overhauled tutorial system.
• Implemented matchmaking system.
• Bug fixing and optimisation.

Sonic Forces

2017 | PC | Hedgehog Engine | SEGA Hardlight
Briefly assisted on the PC port of this console title.

• Added keyboard & mouse input support to the menu systems.

Unannounced VR Project

Cancelled | Desktop VR | Cathode | SEGA Hardlight
This was a project for desktop VR platforms using Creative Assembly’s in-house game engine. Most documentation was unavailable to us, so deciphering the usage of various features and tools meant spending a lot of time reading source code.

• Responsible for level scripting.
• Implemented comfort features to alleviate motion sickness.

Kingdom Conquest - Dark Empire

Cancelled | iOS, Android | Node.js, MongoDB, Unity | SEGA Hardlight
A game with a significant server-based component, workload was divided by gameplay feature so my time was split between developing in Node.js and Unity.

• Built a visual node graph data-binding system enabling artists to implement UI logic across the game's extensive menu systems without programmer assistance.
• Implemented multiple gameplay systems.

Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom

2015 | iOS, Android | Unity | SEGA Hardlight

• Built menu system.
• UI programming.
• Contributed to localisation and tutorial systems.

Crazy Taxi: City Rush

2014 | iOS, Android | Unity | SEGA Hardlight

• Implemented mission scripting system.
• Took ownership of tutorial and UI systems.
• Worked on plugin integrations for Android platform.

Education

Warwick University

2009 - 2013
Computer Science MEng (2:1)
Band Society President 2012/13
Band Society Webmaster 2011/12

Northampton College

2007 - 2009
A Level Mathematics (A)
A Level Physics (A)
A Level Computing (A)
AS Further Mathematics (A)