Pontoco

• I founded and lead the game studio, Pontoco. The company is fully-bootstrapped, and as of 2022, has grown to $1m+ in yearly recurring revenue, and has won numerous awards for game design.

• Over the last 2 years, we have secured (undisclosed) publishing deals with Meta, Sony, Thunderful Group, Robot Teddy, and Cyan Ventures.

• The Last Clockwinder (June 2022)

  • The Last Clockwinder is a hit VR automation game where you make factories out of the time-looping recordings of your own body. The game was published by Robot Teddy (Among Us) and Cyan Ventures (Myst).

  • Within one month of release became the #7 best rated game of all-time on the Oculus Store, and holds an incredible 97% positive Steam rating.

• Gathering Sky (2015)

  • Gathering Sky is a multi-award winning game for iOS, Android and Steam. The game is playful and unique experience about guiding a flock of birds through the sky, featuring an all original score recorded live at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The experience has been featured in festivals and shows across North America.

  • Awards:

    • Indiecade Digital Selection

    • IGF Honorable Mention

    • GDC Game Audio Guild Award (Best Audio)

    • GDC Game Audio Guild Award (Best Sound Design)

    • Indie Prize Showcase 2014

    • Boston Festival of Indie Games Selection

    • Pax East Selection 2015

• Various Projects (2016-2017)

  • During these years, we ran a successful consultation sub-business and produced a variety of small games and experiences for large companies in the bay area, including Occipital, Redrock Software, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

  • This ‘side-business’ kick-started our financials that led to our current success today with The Last Clockwinder.

Talks:

• I regularly lecture at Cornell University on business and game design:

  • Cornell University, 2022 - “The Business of Independent Games” - Lecture

  • Cornell Entrepreneurial Summit 2015 - "Developing the Audio of Gathering Sky", Talk

  • Cornell University, 2014 - "Marketing Successful Indie Games" - Lecture

  • Cornell University, 2013 - "Why Design Matters", Tech Talk Session

• I've given many talks at GDC. In 2022, I actually gave three talks in one conference.

  • GDC 2022 - “Experimental Gameplay Workshop: The Last Clockwinder”

  • GDC 2022 - Tools Summit: File System Tricks for Safe Incremental Builds

  • GDC 2022 - Math In Game Development Summit: Deep Dive: Quaternion Springs

  • GDC/VRDC 2019 - “Faking Mixed Reality: Building Reality Simulators”

  • VRDC 2017 - “Grounded Mixed Reality -- Avoiding the Sticker Effect”

• I speak at other conferences, and internationally:

  • StrangeLoop 2019 - “RGB to XYZ: The Science and History of Color”

  • Git Merge 2019 - “Git for Games” -- Brussels, Belgium

Education

• Cornell University - Class of 2015 - Bachelors of Engineering / Computer Science

• Awards: Kessler Fellow 2012

Research:

• I've been published by ACM for my independent AI research:

  • "The Book of Endless History": Authorial Use of GPT2 for Interactive Storytelling

• I worked with Noah Snavely on Taggpic, a Computer Vision algorithm that can locate any photo in the world. Taggpic was later acquired by Google.

Previous Employment

• I led AR/VR engineering at Funomena Games. We released Luna: Moondust Garden there and spent 1.5 years on an un-announced VR game developed in partnership with Oculus.

• From 2015-2016, I did research at Google Machine Intelligence. Our team was responsible for performing fully-offline privacy-preserving machine learning on the Pixel devices. The software I worked on eventually became what is now Google Lens and the Pixel Smart Eraser.

Canvas

• When I was 16 I released a photo-editing app called Canvas. It was a fully featured editor including infinite layers, smudge, blur, dodge/burn, custom brush import from photoshop, and lasso selection. Feature-wise, it was un-matched until many years later when Adobe finally launched their own suite of editing tools. It was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and made me a steady amount of side income.

• Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like had I grown up in a big city, rather than rural Virginia. I probably would have started a company! Still, this first experience with making apps and games put me on the path I am today.