SANDY BRAND

My last projects

Professional profile

Ever since I was young, I have been fascinated by video games and computer technology. Through the years I have spent much time building video games from which I gained a lot of invaluable experience. Since 2005 I have been doing game development professionally and have been involved in building gameplay systems for the Overlord franchise. Currently I am broadening my horizons and looking for new game development projects to participate in.

• Broad experience in the field of game development, but primarily focussed on gameplay programming in recent years.
• Dedicated, creative, approachable and easy to work with.
• Firm believer in good coding practices and designs, especially on larger projects.
• Provide constructive criticism, valuable contributions to brain-storming session and fleshing out designs (participate in any gameplay feature design/implementation from start to finish).
• Always listening to the needs of designers and providing them with useful features/tools (keeping an eye on user friendliness).

My personal time is devoted to: video and board games, movies, reading, science fiction, fantasy, anime, and outdoor running.

Work experience

Game Programmer

Working on undisclosed title.

Senior Gameplay Programmer

Shipped titles:

Overlord (PC, Xbox 360) and Overlord: Raising Hell (DLC)
Overlord 2 (PC, Xbox 360 PS3)

Various aspect of gameplay programming such as combat mechanics, agents navigation, physics/collision, avatar auto-aiming, perception, performance optimization, and tooling.

Software Engineer

Development of a flexible tool-chain for fully automatic computer language and legacy systems conversions using in-house developed parser technologies. Most notable projects: Cobol to PL/SQL conversion (IBM/CICS to Oracle).

Game Programmer

Wrote a PacMan clone in Java as part of a summer job.

Game Programmer

I did my graduation project for my bachelors degree at Euro-partners Informatici - New Media (8 months) and continued to work there until I started university. For my graduation project I wrote a real-time software renderer in Java (JDK 1.1) based on technologies used in iD software's Quake engine (BSP trees, polygon rasterization, texture mapping).

Technical Skill

I am familiar with a broad range of programming languages and APIs but have mainly focussed on object-oriented languages such as C++ for the last 10 years (object oriented programming and templates are very well suited for gameplay programming in my opinion). In my past I have also done a lot of low-level assembly coding which I find invaluable for solving all sorts of optimization issues.

Education

Technical University Delft

MSc, Computer Science

Graduation project: Efficient obstacle avoidance using autonomously generated navigation meshes (game technology).

Hogeschool Rotterdam

BSc, Informatics

Graduation project ('with honor'): real-time software rendering in Java (game technology).