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My name is Ciaran Culleton, I'm 21 and I currently live in Dundalk, Co. Louth, Ireland. I'm a programmer specialising in games development and currently looking for jobs in the industry. I took part in the Dare to be Digital game development competition in 2008 as part of the Irish team and developed "The Manhattan Strain", An RTS game about containing the spread of a virus through New York city. At the moment the area where I have the most expertise is in gameplay and logic programming but I have knowledge of Collision Detection and Physics as well. This expertise will likely change in the near future as I learn more about physics and engine development.
I have a degree in Games Development from Dundalk Institute of Technology. I graduated in June 2009 with First Class Honours. Since then I have been working on new personal projects and expanding my knowledge of Game Physics and Collision Detection. The Language I have the most experience with at the moment is C# as the major projects I have done so far were built with the Microsoft XNA toolkit but this is rapidly changing as I work my own projects which I'm doing almost exclusively in c++. I have also got experience Java. My primary focus is on programming but I also have knowledge of 3D Modelling and Animation in 3DS Max, sound editing, Game Design (Primarily in gameplay but also interface and concept), AI techniques and different software engineering methods. My primary working experience is with the Scrumm methodology.
I am an avid lover of games of almost all genres. My favourite Genres of games are Strategy Games (both RTS and TBS), RPG's and Action Adventure games. Also sometimes Racing Games, when I find one I like I tend to get hooked on it for quite a while. I like games that have a good story but I'm in no way adversed to mindlessly killing zombies or *insert enemy names here* if it's fun. My favourite games at the moment would include Prototype, Crysis, Medieval 2: Total War, Galactic Civilisations II, Dead Rising, Fallout 1-3, Valkyria Chronicles, Neverwinter Nights 2, Forza 2, Tales of Vesperia, Mass Effect and some others. This list changes all the time, I'm just making the point that I like a lot of different types of games.
Personally, I'm a pretty quiet person until I get to know someone, I enjoy walking, listening to music, watching TV and movies, the usual, I started learning to play the guitar a little while ago and it's great fun but I could really do with finding someone to play with or learn from. I like learning random facts and always enjoy having a good laugh.
What have I worked on?
Thus far I have worked on 2 game development projects (Actually 3 but I don't count the first one as we had only started learning about 3D graphics and game programming so we never got anywhere with it).
They can be found in the portfolio section of my website.
What have I been working on recently?
Since I finished my college course at the beginning of June 09 I have been spending my time learning about some of the more complex, core areas of games development. I created a Quake 3 map content loader and renderer using DirectX 9. I did this to gain an understanding of the process of content loading for a game. The Quake 3 .bsp map files aren't as complex as a lot of the newer file types but it did give me a reasonable grounding in how game level information is initialized. Also, the Quake 3 .bsp files have all their information in binary so gaining an understand of loading binary information was a plus. Rendering the map also gave me an understanding of using multiple buffers for rendering and the difficulties that come with rendering efficiently. The challenge of creating a reasonable number of batches for rendering has become very clear to me.
More recently I have been furthering my knowledge of physics engines and collision detection processes. I'm working through two detailed reference books at the minute.
Game Physics Engine Development by Ian Millington and Real Time Collision Detection by Christer Ericson. I'm learning a huge amount of new information about things I thought I had a basic understanding of but now realise that I knew very little.
Tools of my trade:
Here a list of some of the programs I use on a regular basis.
- Visual C# 2005 express edition
- Visual C# 2008 express edition
- Microsoft XNA framework
- Visual C++ 2008 express edition
- 3DS Max9
- Nvidia fx Composer
- Audacity
- Paint.net / Photoshop
- Crazy Bump
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