Professional Work

Rec Room

I spent 3 years working at Rec Room, Inc, developing their title Rec Room.

Rec Room is a free-to-play cross-platform multiplayer game. It is available on all current generation devices plus Quest 2.

My role at Rec Room was first on the Economy team. The Economy team was responsible for anything related to monetization. The bulk of my time was spent developing tools to enable community creators to monetize their own experiences. But, the team was also responsible for first-party monetization goals, as well.

Eventually, the Economy team was divided into two sub-teams, and I was reassigned to the newly created First-Party Revenue team. I was responsible for revamping the store page to be infinitely configurable by our internal Marketing team, as well as building tools to allow internal (and eventually, external) artists to create avatar items to sell to our players.

Rec Room is a Unity game. As such, I programmed in C# daily. I would, however, need the occasional SQL query to double check our internal storage and purchase ledgers.

Universal Creative: Interactive Wands

Before Rec Room, I spent a summer interning at Universal Creative in Orlando, Florida, as a part of their Advanced Technology Interactives (ATI) team.

In advance of the development of their new theme park Epic Universe, my boss at Universal Creative assigned me the task of designing a new piece of technology that could be used in the Wizarding World section of the new park in the interactive wand exhibits. The problem was that the cameras used in the existing exhibits were only capable of detecting a single spell. That is why every window interaction only houses a single interaction save for one, which actually requires two cameras to operate. My task, then, was to find a way to detect multiple spells using one camera, all while still using the same cameras and the same wands that have already been sold. This would enable the design team to add as many spells as they wanted to a single exhibit without needing to mount a camera for each individual spell.

At first, the task seemed insurmountable. The cameras were a black box that simply output a signal when the spell was cast. However, there just so happened to be a single existing experience that actually required the wand position, which allowed a set of eyes to focus on the guest's wand. This unlocked the full potential of the wand.

Equipped with the single back up camera for the eye exhibit (and the 20lb case it came in), I spent the next month developing a Unity game that would translate the realtime (x,y) coordinates of the wand over time into a symbol that could be fed into a Tensorflow machine learning model I had trained on the given spells.

The fruits of my efforts were the new interactive wand installations in all three parks. Here is a walkthrough of some of the experiences enabled by the technology I developed:

Other Projects

Early Projects	Recent Projects	Tech Demos

Education

Fall 2016 to Spring 2020 - BS in Computer Science and minors in Physics and Game Design

Fall 2020 to Spring 2022 - Master of Entertainment Technology