| andrew edward bailey | cv | personal website |
Name: Andrew Edward Bailey B.Eng. AMUS
Nationality: British/Australian/Canadian (Triple citizenship)
Residence: West Vancouver, Canada.
As a games industry veteran, I have been creating video games for 37 years and am credited on over 70 published titles, spanning mobile to home console.
I have wide experience as an Indie Programmer, Principal Programmer, Technical Director, CTO, Executive and Company Founder with a proven history of delivering within high pressure environments to strict schedules.
I am a creative problem solver who thinks outside of the box and inspires my teams and colleagues and remain a passionate coder to this day.
My Career has spanned from 8 bit home machines and consoles to the current crop of next gen consoles. I have also been involved for multiple years in the mobile space, both as a self-publisher and Technical Executive, and have a thorough understanding of Premium to Free to Play gaming models.
Principal Tools and Infrastructure Programmer Central Technologies Activision
June 2017 – Present
Responsible for UI based tools, runtime engine support, and full stack tools that enable sharing of technologies between the various studios of Activision. As part of a team that reports directly to the publisher, self-governance via coordination between key members of game development teams to derive feature requests and issue resolving.
Principal Engine Programmer at Relic Entertainment
March 2016 – June 2017
Responsible for technical direction of multi-title RTS ‘Essence’ Engine. Maintain and schedule backlog of engine development and maintenance tasks. Mentor and troubleshoot with junior staff. Assist HR with programmer screening and interviews. Also responsible for core architecture refactoring and global optimisations for DoW3 project.
Senior Software Engineer at Capcom Vancouver.
Jan 2014 – March 2016
Core systems manager responsible for maintaining a common engine platform for the company, while also concentrating on the immediate issues of the company’s lead product. Responsible for defining direction and managing tasks involved in a major refactor of internal technologies. Also responsible for defining both medium and long term work goals and interacting with executives and technical directors.
Technical Director at Koolhaus Games
July 2012 – Jan 2014
Responsible for technical direction at Koolhaus games, in-house technologies development and problem solving. Also responsible for the management of the entire engineering department including HR responsibilities such as performance reviews, and mentoring.
CEO at Drop Spider Games (Owner/Founder)
November 2009 – June 2012
Offer my services as a technical consultant and have successfully produced an in-house original product from scratch to market place (www.golemcrusades.com). I’ve helped design and develop a AAA iOS game scheduled for release by a top tier publisher in January 2012.
Director and CTO at Tantalus Media.
January 1994 – November 2009 (15 years 10 months)
Set and oversaw the technical vision and strategy of the company. Designed and implemented most the engine and associated tools, adapting them over multiple generations of consoles. I was one of the original founders of the company and board executive until I sold my stake in 2006.
Senior Programmer at Beam Software
1990 – 1993 (3 years)
Senior Game and Tools programmer.
Independent Professional (Self-employed)
September 1982 – September 1989 (7 years 1 month)
Indie Games Programmer and Designer.
Education
Bachelor of Engineering Honours, Information Systems Technology, 1986 – 1989. University of Surrey (UK)
Associate member of the University of Surrey.
5 A Levels- Purbrook Comprehensive School. (UK)
Executive Skills
I was founder and Chief Technical Officer of Tantalus Pty Ltd for 16 years. At its peak the studio had 100 staff with the engineering department comprising about 30%. I was sole TD of a small Vancouver studio, and am currently managing core system development and directing a large engineering team.
I have also run my own indie company for 3 years. My responsibilities have been many as listed below.
Executive - As CTO and TD I sat on the company’s Executive board contributing to decisions in relation to overall strategy, vision, structure, direction, product mix, resources and marketing. This included scoping the technical requirements of new projects and establishing accurate budgets. In my current position I report to the game TD and the CTO.
Teams - I have been responsible for selecting programming teams for our projects based on my knowledge of all technical employees’ skill sets. Projects varied in budget from $300K to $3M. I have worked within the multiple teams structure of mid-sized North American companies, directing and managing a number of engineers.
Code reviews - Initiated post and hind sight code review practices adopting a peer based system. This was achieved by rotating the responsibility (chairing) of code reviews amongst senior programmers and thereby maximizing peer to peer take up. Code reviews were also a good way of developing and improving internal coding practices by encouraging team members to initiate them in the first place.
Technology - Responsible for developing and maintaining the internal technology strategy of the company in addition to implementation whilst delegating 'engine' work to appropriate staff. I have also been responsible for assessing and recommending the acquisition of third party technologies.
Mentoring - I possess strong mentoring and team motivational skills. I practiced side by side mentoring for about 20% of my time at Tantalus teaching programming staff particular skills or helping them with bugs and optimizations. At Koolhaus, mentoring took about 50% of time.
Human Resources - I have been responsible for the interviewing and recruitment of technical staff and interns which involved creating, maintaining and assessing the coding tests for new recruits at all levels.
Documentation - Responsible for external documentation (1st party SDKs etc) and for writing internal documentation on the company’s tools. At its peak this comprised a 400 page reference manual, plus tutorials and a how to get started manual.
Spot Fire Control - Responsible for 'spot fires' such as unfix-able bugs, technical resource issues (out of memory issues), 1st party compliance issues, performance issues. Sometimes this would be a mentoring exercise, a R&D EPOC exercise or just me rolling up my sleeves and fixing the issue on my own. At Capcom I have quickly become the come-to guy for low level systems and their related tools (which are numerous).
Technical Skills - My engineering experience spans engine systems, tools, build pipes and gameplay. This broad experience allows me to architect solutions that work throughout all the entire production workflows.
Project Management - Agile Methodologies, Open office, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Jira, Confluence, MS Project.
Tools - I’ve built many in-house tools. These include GUI based paint packages, including for tiled and palette based architectures, GUI 3D modellers and backend CLI data platform preparation and compression.
Game Engines - I’ve developed many engine technologies, below are the most relevant today. It should be noted that I personally own the rights to the Venom IP. At Capcom I am an architect and manager on low level systems and performance optimizations. At a more executive level I have also been involved in developing the multi-year strategy for the future of the internal game engine. Total ground up redesign of Koolhaus’s internal engine, including a deferred render for mobile platforms. Managed a small team to my technical design.
Venom - a Drop Spider Game Engine, which I designed and wrote. Details on it and in particular the deferred rendering engine can be found on this site. This also includes an asset pipeline that runs both on Windows and OSX, based on SCons. Currently Venom is optimized for PC, iOS and Android.
Hydra - This is the next generation incarnation of Tantalus’ MercuryPlus engine which I created. Its main difference (apart from improved rendering pipelines) is the support of multi/concurrent threading to the application game programmer. Platforms supported: Wii, PSP, DX9, PS3 & Xbox360.
Janus - This is a hybrid engine (hence Janus the two headed God) I designed and created for the Nintendo DS platform. It is based on Mercury Plus, but uses fixed point math, accelerated by the DS hardware. It also provides hardware sprite support & virtual cell based backgrounds. It has a very compatible API with Mercury Plus (not an easy task given the extreme difference in hardware) as shown by the SpongeBob Yellow Avenger game which shares a code base for both PSP & DS.
TGR Engine (ref code for physics etc.) incorporating REVS & CRIS - This IP I created for the GBA racing game by Tantalus. REVS is a track generation system, and CRIS is an award winning 3D polygon rendering system, used for the player vehicle in these games.
Build Pipelines - I’m a strong believer in stream lined, single click, build systems. Over the past two decades I’ve found Python to be excellent for this job and have been applauded by many external companies/clients on the quality of the build processes I’ve developed. I’ve created a set of Python tools that allow the easy processing of source art materials to target platforms. These mirror a lot of the technologies I developed at Tantalus, but are re-written in Python, providing a vastly more compact but reusable code base. This includes an intermediate GOM file format for describing geometry in XML, and managing it (including preview rendering) in python.
Created the Tantalus Python build system, which is how we drove the pipeline, compiling and putting everything together. It was built on SCons and was complemented with a set of Python wrappers to expose the entire art pipeline to Python scripting. This allowed the processes of exporting from Maya (8.5 support Python), compiling, processing image files, integrating Havok middleware and perforce access to be immediately scriptable. As well as allowing game custom logic to be added to the art pipeline, it allowed the entire pipeline to be integrated into a single script. (Separate presentation available on request:- GCAP Conference, Australia 2007).
My engineering experience spans engine systems, tools, full stack, build pipes and gameplay. This broad experience allows me to architect solutions that work throughout all the entire production workflows.
Coding Languages - C/C++, Python, C#, Java, Flash (AS3), Lua, Perl, Javascript
Relic - 6502, 65816, Z80, XX86 SHC family, ARM, MIPS.
Industry specific - PSP VFPU. PS2 VU.
Libraries - OpenGL, DirectX, iOS, Android, OSX, OAL, FMOD, Havok, Box2D
Graphics - HLSL, OpenGL
Meta Languages - HTML, XSLT, XML , JSON, Schematron
Build Systems - Make, SCons, Visual Studio, Eclipse, Flash Builder, XCode.
Compression-Encryption Technologies - PKZIP, LIBPNG, JPEG, MD5, Blowfish plus own IP.
Revision Control - Perforce, GIT, SVN, CrusieControl.Net (continuous integration), Jenkins
Art SDKs - Maya Mel-Python and C++ SDK, Max SDK, Softimage, Lightwave, Photoshop, FBX.
Third Party Engine Technologies - Unreal, Unity 3D
Venom, Hydra, Janus - Self-Developed Engine Technologies
REST and Backend - Docker, Rancher, CouchDB, CherryPy, Flask, Jinja, AWS, Tomcat, SQL, sql-lite., Jira and Confluence
Here are some links to documents and external professional sites.
My Resume in PDF format
My Linked in page.
This site showcases my iOS work.
I am rather proud of the build system and tool chain developed at Tantalus, and this is a copy of a talk given on at the 2007 Game Connect Asia Pacific Conference.
At Tantalus we we developed a fully cross platform Lua development environment and released to the public domain. This is the presentation from the 2008 Game Connect Asia Pacific Conference.
And now for a little bit noestalga. Before the days of the Internet, game reviews game in magazine format. This is my scrapbook for the reviews of Druid.
| All Rights Reserved 2019. |