Jon Ross

Sumire was my most recent project, and I worked as the lead enginner with the incredible GameTomo team, as well as with artists, musicians, and other developers around Japan, to bring a beautiful story of a girl in rural Japan who meets a mystical flower with only one day left to live. The game was built in the Unity engine, and my work included building core architecture, gameplay scripting, integrating and localizing Yarn dialogue files, integrating Spine 2d animation in a 2.5d world, and building and optimizing for Steam on PC and Mac, and App Store on iOS.

Drawn to Death is a multiplayer third-person brawler/shooter for the PlayStation 4. The game takes place inside the pages of a notebook filled with crudely drawn sketches. I joined the development team while the game was being prototyped. I implemented networked gameplay using C# scripts in the Unity game engine. My responsibilities included integrating Sony's Scream audio engine and using it to script the game's sound effects, voice overs, and music; Unity UI for the game HUD, options menus, the in-game store, and game lobby; and Sony libraries to support the game's PS4 trophy system.

"Mishap the Accidental Haunting" and "Mishap 2: the Intentional Haunting" are action-packed casual hidden object games where the player helps famous ghost hunter Milton Hobblepop capture ghosts. Mini games follow each level of hunting down items in beautiful rendered environments. The games are developed in the Torque game engine. I joined the team after the success of the first title to help port the game from PC to iPad. I was able to greatly reduce the game's texture memory by writing a texture atlas tool in Python to combine small images. For Mishap 2, I implemented Torque scripts for game effects, the riddle scenes, and the "Hair-raiser" makeover mini-game.

Scurvy the Seaweed Slinger is an endearing tale about an optimistic crab who lives in the middle of a trash heap deep under the sea. Scurvy the Seaweed Slinger is a 2.5-D, side-scrolling platformer that asks the player to help Scurvy escape by swinging on fish hooks and manipulating the environment with seaweed. I worked as the Technology Lead on this project with a team of seven programmers. The game engine was created from scratch using C++ and DirectX. My responsibilities included the collision engine, the camera system, game-play mechanics, and inverse kinematic animations for character grappling and swinging.

The game is now a part of the traveling museum exhibit, MathAlive, which educates attendees about how math is used in many real world applications live video games, robotics, and extreme sports.

MotoCast is an application for Motorola smartphones that allows users to stream media from their desktop computers to their device. While at Motorola, I worked with the UX team to develop Android user interfaces in Java, including the music player and video player.

Before the Human Engines startup was acquired by Motorola Mobility, I had the opportunity to work on a project with Barnes and Noble for their Nook Color tablet. We improved the magazine reading experience by optimizing rendering and adding shader-based, animated page-turns to the reader application. My work mainly included working on a carousel for quickly advancing pages.