Thirty years in software, from Gremlin Interactive and Deep Red Games through twelve years running Games Faction to contract engineering at Hidden Bridge.
After an Unreal cook pipeline engagement early in the year, committed properly to the next game — Cinder for rendering, Pulse for multiplayer — funded by frontier-model evaluation work rather than by further contract delivery.
A year given largely to independent R&D: prototyping renderer architecture in C99 against Vulkan 1.3, and working out what the next game actually needed from its technology before committing to build it.
Event ingestion, ad-hoc analytical queries and feature-flag evaluation behind one pipeline — durable JetStream streams into embedded DuckDB, with no warehouse cluster to operate.
Third engagement for PlayerState across four years. A Golang and Svelte platform letting brands run creative competitions inside their own Discord communities, with moderation and judging built around reviewer attention rather than raw throughput.
A second Ethereum-based digital art project. The engineering held up; the market for it did not, and the wider collectibles space contracted sharply through the year.
A browser WebGL renderer for procedurally generated trainers, doubling as the authoring tool creators used to design them, over a Golang, Rust and Vue collectibles platform.
Native Mac and Windows desktop apps with embedded WebRTC, built as remote working became the default. One C++17 core with Vulkan rendering and a Golang session backend, rather than an Electron wrapper.
Consultancy's first year of delivery: early platform work for PlayerState, and a refactor of 10+ Objective-C and Swift apps for a mobile telemetry company. Set the pattern for the years after — one client at a time, end-to-end ownership.
Left Fig.co and set up Hidden Bridge Limited as sole engineer and director. Contract delivery end-to-end — architecture through implementation — across games, graphics, backends and distributed SaaS.
Joined the San Francisco crowd-funding platform for games (acquired Ownage Limited in 2018). Built Golang backend and React frontend, Ethereum engagement platform, Unity/Unreal C++ SDK, and Flutter wallet apps.
Co-designed and shipped Storm the Train on iOS and Android using Games Faction's proprietary OpenGL/C++ engine. One of the studio's biggest commercial hits.
Started an independent games studio in Sheffield. Built proprietary DirectX and OpenGL engines, an async C++ backend runtime, co-developed five games, and delivered 20+ client apps for brands including DIAGEO and adidas. Ran recruitment, finance, legal, publishing and fundraising.
Shipped Deep Red's real-time competitive tycoon sim for PC — city building, rival businesses, and Monopoly mechanics combined. Crediting on MobyGames as Lead Programmer.
Joined Milton Keynes simulation studio as Lead Programmer, later Technical Director. Lead programmer on Monopoly Tycoon; built engine and simulation systems for Tycoon City: New York and other titles. Led a core-tech team of eight and coordinated roughly thirty engineers studio-wide.
Started as a programmer at Sheffield-based Gremlin Interactive on PC and PlayStation 1 titles, including Actua Soccer 2 & 3 and Actua Tennis. C and C++98 on console and desktop.
Graduated with honours in Computer Science before joining Gremlin Interactive the following month.