After Modern Warfare ( 2019 ) shipped, I started working on cooperative content for Modern Warfare II. This title, the team wanted to tackle more sophisticated coop experiences than what our previous Spec Ops missions were. This idea evolved into the design of the raid ‘Atomgrad’. I helped co-lead the design pillars of the mode, and worked on an initial vertical slice of what a Call of Duty raid would be. It was a really gratifying challenge to bring action shooter style raids, and adapt them into the franchise.

Along with owning and shipping a spec ops mission, I worked on designing and implementing season 2 of the raid, as well as supporting the team for other seasons.

It’s been really rewarding seeings the playerbase react positively to the raids.

Get it from Battle.Net

In February 2018 I was given the opportunity to join Infinity Ward as a game designer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. It was a 2 year project, and I worked with the CP team in making the Spec Ops mode, a 4 player PVE mode focused on teamwork and hardcore encounters. It was an amazing experience. I owned a number of systems on the CP side, such as player and AI battlechatter, an objective system, among others; as well as designing, pitching and implementing a variety of missions for the modes, playable in the Operation: Paladin, and the first half of Operation: Headhunter.

I also had the chance to help with some work in the battle royale mode, Warzone.

Get it from Battle.Net

I had the great opportunity to work on Friday the 13th: the Game in 2017, doing design, gameplay programming and tool programming for implementing the Virtual Cabin 2.0 single player experience.  The Virtual Cabin serves both as a museum of all the game assets, and a space for puzzles and scripted events that tease upcoming content.  Being a long time fan of the series, this game was a dream to work on.

Get it from Steam.

King's Quest (2015) is an episodic adventure game for PC, XBox One, XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.  I wore many hats in this project:  Engineer, Designer and Scripter.  So far it's been the biggest project I've been part of.  I had a lot of fun with King's Quest, developing and implementing scenes, and puzzles, and am very proud of the result.

Get it from Steam.

Wayward Manor is a casual puzzle game for PC and Mac.  So far it's been my biggest challenge.  I started out as the lead engineer for the project, and soon had to also act as a lead designer and a producer for it.  It's a game designed to be played by people with no previous game experience, and as such, the puzzle and level design was a challenge.  I was responsible for the underlaying systems in the game, such as pathfinding, AI, and input detection to name a few.  The other engineer in the project is David Mazzocco, who provided invaluable work.  It showcases art by Vidal Perez, Brenton Hesse and Christian Brierley.  I'm very proud of my team for this game.

Get it from Steam.

Agent P: Doofendash is an endless runner for mobile platforms.  It was a fun game to make, and play.  I joined the team at the middle of the project, and took ownership of the interface implementation, but eventually moved on to gameplay programming as well.  The engineering team was formed by Rob Thompson and myself, and it was a very refreshing, different project than my previous games.

Get it from the iTunes Store.

Get it from Google Play.

Flea Symphony was an amazing experience.  I took charge of the whole codebase for this game.  I had to design and implement level creation tools, iterate quickly with the designers to find the proper balance of instruments and musical challenges and preserve the integrity of the high definition art from our artist, Vidal Perez, who did an amazing job.  This was a huge and satisfying undertaking, and remains one of my favorite games that I've ever worked on.

Get it from the iTunes Store.

Agent P strikes back is currently the most popular flash game on the Disney online portal.  One of my secondary duties during my contract there was to support the engineering team with porting it to HTML5, with a focus on multiplatform, and they just made the beta public.  This was an amazing experience. I got to work on sound, character control, and boss behavior.  The engineering team is comprised of Balaji Rathinasekaran, Tri Desa, and Tamer Safwat.  I had a lot of fun working on this and learned a great deal from everyone.

Play it here for free.

The Electric Company is a license from Sesame Workshop, it's aimed mainly towards preteen kids.  I worked on this game during summer and fall 2010, and it was a great experience.  The objective of the whole project was to figure out a way to let kids take on the roles of mentor and student, and to have the mentor guide his/her pupil towards the right answers in different games.

When we started out, we made a lot of experiments with voice based recognition, but that didn't really convey the sense of mentorship that we sought, so we turned instead to gestures.  We went through various input devices, including the kinect camera, but we ended up using Wiimotes, which proved to be very compatible with the gameplay we had.

The Electric Company game is really three small mini games, all with a different mechanic.  The first one, <strong>"Say What?"</strong> requires each player to choose the starting or ending part of a word they hear.

Next comes "Karate", in which the first player will receive a word which he has to chop in the right place, then receive a new word part from the second player, who has to choose the correct one.  Between both, they form a new word, which has to go through all the process again.

Finally, there's <strong>"Secret Agent"</strong>, the most complex of all;  in this game, players will venture through a jungle facing obstacles, which are overcome by forming words that will get rid of them. For example, when they find a car without a wheel, they can spell WHEEL to get one and drive away.

This project required a lot of crunch time, which was really fun.  I was one of two programmers, and worked mostly on Secret Agent and the Menu system,  the other coder was Bryan Duran.  We had a team of three artists, a producer and a writer.  Overall this project was very educative and fun.

This game is property of Sesame Workshop, so I can't post any code or let you play it here.

Mother Nature is a game developed for PC with Primesense cameras (think Microsoft's Kinect).  It's a project I worked for during my masters.  The objective is to plant and grow seeds in a garden using a gestural interface, and to prevent locusts from eating the plants.  There are many more elements to the garden, such as bees and birds, which affect gameplay in various ways.  It's a very formative experience, as everyone in the team is involved in design decisions.

Because at the beginning of the project we didn't have access to the primesense camera all the time, we needed to create a "Primesense recorder", that transformed the skeleton data from the camera into a simple file.

My main tasks for Mother Nature were writing this recorder, and a lot of gameplay programming, specially regarding the locust behavior.  As the project progresses, I've taken charge of more animal behaviors in the game, such as bees and spiders.  It's been a great ride to work with my team on this.

Play it now.

ShapeUp is a game developed for Microsoft's Kinect, formerly known as project Natal.  It was developed for a course in USC, with myself as the lead engineer and team leader.   I managed a ten person team comprised of artists, designers and programmers.  This particular project was especially challenging, because it was created during the Spring of 2010 -way before the Kinect dev kits were available to most professional developers, let alone schools- we didn't have access to the hardware but for two days at the beginning of the project.  We had to work with camera  recordings of those two days, and design and program the game around them.

The project started out as a Gamebryo game, and we had a fully functional framework to work on by the end of a month.  However, our art pipeline wouldn't have been able to deliver all the required assets in time to make the final deliverable;  so we switched to using the Xdks with DirectX.  The change meant a lot of late nights, especially during the last week, but it ensured we had a fully playable, complete game that  worked with Kinect, and had a single player and two player mode.

It was a really fun project to be part of, and of course I can't post anything else but that video because of my NDA with Microsoft.

This was an extreme experience.  I worked with a great team during just a weekend to design, program and debug this game from scratch.  The whole thing was done in a little less than 48 hours for the 2010 Global Game Jam. Ben Bharier and Max Grossman worked on the art and level design and did a wonderful job of creating the monkey and the backgrounds.  Wilson Saunders and myself were the programmers.  The general game design was a joint effort of all of us.  Wilson did the tool programming (I learned a lot of programming tricks from him during that weekend) and I helped program the enemy behavior, bullet and death system, as well as the wall perforation and building.

It was a really exhausting experience, but rewarding and fun nonetheless, and I was really proud to be part of my team.  This was coded using Allegro, a game library for C++ that uses magic pink bitmaps to display graphics on screen.  I had never heard of it before this project, but it was really interesting to learn it.

I collaborated in a team to make this game in my user interface design class.  Poorak Kashyap, Sachdev Sing and Nishal Segant were part of the development as well.  My contributions to this project were the 3d models (made using Flex) that you see in the video, the game design and the programming of the augmented reality in Actionscript 3, using FlarToolkit.

This was a very fun project, as it required to design both the gameplay and the setup of the player, computer and camera.  We were more interested in providing a useful and intuitive interface to the player than to actually be faithful to every rule in Blackjack.  I had to learn how to model in Flex for this one, and while a bit daunting, it was also very rewarding.  My favorite part was actually coding in actionscript to import my models into the program, however;  watching those wooden arrows come up on top of the markers was really satisfying.

Play it now.

This was my first artificial intelligence project when I started my masters, and it was really interesting.  The goal was to make a pathfinding algoritm based on A* using units from StarCraft.  I programmed it using gcc on my mac computer, but the makefile will work in any Unix based OS, and just copying the code onto a windows compiler should do the trick there as well.  The challenge was to make a good design using only ASCII characters that was still readable and cool to see.  The algorithm itself was very challenging and interesting to code; I love pathfinding, and seeing it working was an extremely rewarding experience.

The algorithm works in three different scenarios: one where the zergling chases the marine, one where both combatants seek each other out, and finally, a race between both, where the marine tries to get inside a bunker while the zerg chases him.  You can load different scenarios/maps and play them out.

Get the Source Code.