What kind of
dev am I?

Hi, my name is Reed! I am a junior C++ programmer & Unreal Engine 5 developer. Over the last year, I have dedicated myself to learning the fundamentals of Object Oriented Programming & game design. My goal is to level up my skills as part of a team of passionate developers & ship creatively fulfilling, successful games.

My EXP

Here’s a collection of games I’ve built in Unreal Engine 5.0 as part of my class curriculum.

Warehouse Wreckage

This game was done entirely within Blueprints & was an assignment to demonstrate creating functions, adding impulses to spawned objects & collision physics.

Obstacle Assault

This project used mostly Blueprints with additional C++ code used to program mover components for various platforms & objects within an obstacle course & also introduced pawn possession.

Toon Tanks

The goals for this Tank vs Turret battle were to setup an inheritance hierarchy for shared functionality between child classes, hit events, basic win/lose conditions & particle/sound/camera effects.

Crypt raider

Here, our assignment was to build a dungeon from scratch using static meshes, experiment with dynamic lighting & program trigger boxes & line traces entirely within C++.

Blender Donuts

This is a 3D rendered animation of a plate of donuts that I modeled in Blender. It utilizes geometry nodes, distribution points on faces, path tracing, bounce lighting, subsurface scattering & shade smoothing.

SImple Shooter

This 3rd Person Shooter assignment focused on creating AI behavior trees, animation blend spaces, nav meshes & gun classes. I also built a zoom function & ammo/health pickup system as extra credit.

What’s my questline?

Ever since my older brother passed down his PS1 and SNES game consoles to me, I have been enamored with video games & the technology that powers them. I’ve wanted to make games for as long as I can remember but didn’t know where to start, so I decided to do the next best thing & became a Micro Center computer repair technician. To that end, I obtained my CompTIA A+ certification. My favorite aspect of my job was building custom gaming PCs.

After 3 years of building & repairing computers, my passion for games led me to streaming challenge runs of Bloodborne & Dark Souls as well as writing/editing video essays dissecting my favorite titles. Through content creation, I’ve made very good friends with backgrounds in programming & professional game development who have provided me with the guidance & support I needed to build a roadmap & realize my ambitions to start my journey in game development.

Since then, I have completed C++ courses, Unreal Engine 5.0 courses & have been studying game design fundamentals via developer interviews & dev cycle documentaries. I am open & enthusiastic to working in any genre, but the kinds of games that inspire me the most are those with a focus on rich world building, intricate level design & systems based emergent gameplay i.e. Soulslikes, Immersive Sims, Metroidvanias, etc.