Current / Recent Work

Hauntibles Demo

Co-Founder of Lunar Lunchbox LLC -

Technical director and Lead Developer of Hauntibles - a spirited next gen shooter inspired by the cursed remains of roguelikes, rpgs, and all hallows eve.

PC First Person Shooter Pitch Demo - Unreal 5

My roles: Technical Director, Development, Game Design (Blueprints, Rapid prototyping)

Highlights:
4 player Co-op gameplay - challenge enemies, share loot, and tackle the massive boss as a four person team - Unreal netcode and custom blueprints to manage enemy and player locomotion, enemy and item spawns, player to enemy and player to player damage, destructible environment components.

Modular level system to add and configure grouped content at runtime throughout multiple spaces. levels trigger enemy encounters, boss fights, secret treasures (and eventually allow 4 players to share their player hubs and customized spaces)

Unreal Engine 4 / 5 Work

Beyond Our Stars

Co-Founder of Lunar Lunchbox LLC - core developers of Beyond Our Stars since 2016

An epic adventure built from the ground up for VR - An endeavor focused on exploration and discovery amongst the stars.

My roles: Technical Director, Development, Game Design (Blueprints, OOP patterns, Rapid prototyping, multiple HMD dev targets)

all work shown developed for Quest2 but is recorded in-editor on PC

Environment interaction scripting and design

Skeletal Mesh scripting, Material Parameter scripting, dynamic instance management, organic collision and motion detection, object manipulation, loosely coupled events and reactions

script-driven vfx and lighting, interactive environment design and scripting, minigame design and management, single-responsibility principles

Character Interaction / Behaviors

multi-npc and player cooperative logic, throw/catch/watch behaviors, anim blending via blueprints and AI state machines

player interactions with player equipment. head direction and eye material animation driven through AI blueprint and behavior tree, object control with motion tracking on hands / head

Unity Work

XR Collaborative Sales Experience and R&D

2023/2024

Work visuals not available - under NDA

VR / XR Development and team management for a consumer goods company in the top 100 of the fortune 500 list.

(consulting work - two roles over 11 months)

Team manager / developer / delivery lead for VR product sales app - large scale sales for international grocery chains.

Managed a team of 4 (1 onshore, 3 offshore) developers, delivered 3 cooperative sales experiences for the Quest in 4 months.

Delivered improved optimization, visual fidelity, turnaround time and project management pipelines with each delivery.

Core team lead achievements:

Improved existing application architecture and development delivery time

Expanded offering with a dev pipeline for a modern and modular alternative VR app product

Lead dev for a Consumer Goods research VR app (retail shelf configuration and sales optimization)

Consistent delivery and direction for feature development and enhancements to consumer goods research app used in the field.

Received constant high praise from Product Owner on both development quality, and roadmap/architecture foresight during dev and planning meetings.

(App was live - used for testing done on-site across the Midwest and in the EU and Middle East while I was on the project.)

Collaborative Productivity 2021 - 2023

Design and development work on a cross platform engineering and cad viewer / collaboration tool.

30+ user collaborative experience across PC, Oculus Quest1&2, Hololens, and WebGL.

Load models using gltf from live server directory to compare and annotate, take measurements, change user perspective scale from .001X to 100X.

Core Development Features:

Cross platform user scale - using set scale buttons or slider, user’s scale is adjustedin their own experience, and mirrored in all collaborator’s experiences. (HoloLens scale was binary, either fullscale or miniature)

Measure tool - selecting two points in the scene creates a measureline with quarter inch increments, and has snapping options. (lines are accurately shared across all user’s experience)

Generate Report - at the push of a button in-headset or on the PC/web app, a report is generated with orthographic and elevation views of the scene, as well as individual thumbnails of the annotated objects, the annotation contents, and email the completed pdf to an email account.

Training Modules (2016-2022)

Atomic Absorbtion Spectrophotometer Training App - Hololens

https://www.onginnovations.com/lab-equipment-training

lead developer - responsible for all UI and Interactions within app

Multimeter Training - Quest 2

Developer - responsible for Multimeter features, and general flow

Architected and developed modular multimeter node system, making it easy to add any number of touchpoints and set the value to display on multimeter.

Fire Extinguisher Training - Quest and PC

C# developer - developed features and scenarios for immersive safety training.

Responsible for porting entire experience to PC - including screen based UI and PC features.

Dynamic Character Animation (all unity, no 3d anim software) - Quest/PC

Custom animations made with UMotionPro in ~16 hours

lead developer - responsible for all UI and Interactions within app

VR / AR development experience

Immersive media including Virtual and Augmented reality allows for incredibly engaging training sessions, which in turn help learners build muscle memory and retain skills and knowledge. XR development demands a wide variety of human interface and spatial thinking patterns and experience, James has worked on many apps that fully utilize the XR spectrum of UX, including hand and wrist interactive menus, eye tracking, spatial anchors and spatial recognition, computer vision.

James counts 10+ years experience with corporate and enterprise training across a multitude of topics, formats and training styles. His work history involves learning and engagement experiences targeting PCs, web, tablets and mobile, as well as tethered HMDs, standalone, and fringe devices like the Xbox Kinect, and HoloLens.

Application types designed and/or developed (XR and ‘flat’):

training - Safety and awareness, fire and Emergency, governance, ethics, banking, finance, product design, market research, onboarding and company culture.

collaboration - multi-user engineering viewer and annotation tools, product and bulk sales experiences

research - consumer goods testing and reception