Joseph Bennett

I’m currently at Dinosaur Polo Club where I’ve worked for the past three years on Mini Motorways: a strategy simulation game about designing the roads for a growing city.

Here’s some things I’ve worked on during my time here:

• Many graphical shaders and effects like the stripes on motorways
• Prototyping and development of new gameplay additions
• An automated nightly build system written in Python with Slack changelog notifications
• Automated mesh generation for maps
• Rendering optimisations and performance improvements for the Nintendo Switch port
• Integration with native Swift/Objective-C code for features like leaderboards and notifications

I’ve also had experience this year as co-lead for the Mini Motorways technology team. As part of this role, I’ve facilitated and lead prototyping of a new feature for a currently unreleased update, helped support and guide other team members with their work, and supported the team lead with their workload.

I worked on gameplay optimisations to help port Five Night’s at Freddy’s: Help Wanted to the Occulus Quest. This involved lots profiling and performance improvements in a large pre-existing Unreal Engine project.

For my Master’s thesis, I wanted to find a global illumination algorithm that would run on mobile phones while still looking good on higher end devices. I found a method based on a paper called real-time global illumination by precomputed local reconstruction from sparse radiance probes and managed to get it running on an iPhone 7 at 30FPS on the Sponza test scene while still looking good on higher end computers. Here’s my thesis if you’re interested (and have a lot of spare time!)

Interdimensional Llama is a perspective-switching puzzle adventure game where you play as Lou - an adorable Llama.

I was a programmer on this project as part of a university course with five other students. My main contributions were the seamless level transitioning, and the grid-based navigation for movement in 2D and 3D.

The game was a finalist in the New Zealand 2016 Kiwi Game Starter funding competition. For this, I helped write the business proposal and pitched the game to the judging panel.

A fourth-year computer graphics project I worked on with Thomas Roughton. Its aim was to implement some graphics techniques within our own engine to improve the visual quality of Interdimensional Llama.

I implemented a physically based real-time volumetric fog algorithm based on a presentation by Sebastien Hillaire from Frostbite. The in-engine screenshot on this card showcases the technique.

A summer internship where I researched improvements to hair rendering in their real-time renderer Gazebo.

An internship over multiple summers and part-time during the university year. Frontend and backend development with Ruby on Rails with a heavy focus on writing clean and readable code, unit testing, and code review.

Frontend and backend development in Python using Django at a startup called Publons. I set up continuous integration for the company with automated testing and deployment. Used Jenkins running on an Linux based AWS server.