Game development: shipped titles, engines, and original games

Shipped titles

• Halo Infinite (343 Industries, 2021, Xbox Series X|S and Windows). I worked on gameplay in C++ and Lua. Microsoft reported more than 20 million players by January 2022, the biggest launch in the franchise's history. I'm credited under Software Engineering in the game's official credits.
• NBA 2K22 (Visual Concepts / 2K, 2021, PlayStation 5). I built in‑game features, gameplay mechanics, and systems in C++ for an annual sports title. Take‑Two reported more than 10 million units sold in. I'm credited as an additional engineer on the PlayStation 5 release.
• Glow Artisan (Powerhead Games, 2009, Nintendo DSiWare; 2010, Windows Phone 7). A color‑mixing puzzle game and the studio's first original IP. I was one of its programmers. It won Best Mobile Game Design at the 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile awards and was a finalist for the grand prize. Nintendo Life gave it 9/10, Microsoft put it in the Windows Phone 7 Xbox LIVE launch lineup, and fifteen years later it was still on Nintendo Life's list of the 31 best DSiWare games. Watch the official trailer.
• Major League Baseball 2K10 (Powerhead Games for 2K Sports, 2010, Nintendo DS). A fully licensed MLB title on handheld hardware. I'm credited for audio programming on the DS version. Watch IGN's DS gameplay.
• Did It Myself ABC123 (Powerhead Games, 2010, Nintendo DSiWare). I did programming on an early‑childhood educational game, the first DSiWare title the ESRB rated EC. Nintendo Life scored it 8/10 and called it "the next best thing to Sesame Street" on the platform.
• Petz: Catz 2 (Powerhead Games for Ubisoft, 2007, Nintendo DS). Additional programming credit on a virtual‑pet game in Ubisoft's Petz series. Watch a DS gameplay review.
• Winx Club: Quest for the Codex and Mission Enchantix (Powerhead Games for Konami, 2006 and 2008, Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance). Programming credits on two licensed titles, written within the limits of GBA and DS hardware. Watch DS gameplay of Quest for the Codex and Mission Enchantix.
• Catz (Powerhead Games for Ubisoft, 2006, Nintendo DS). Programming on the virtual‑pet game whose sequel, Petz: Catz 2, is also on this list. That makes seven.

Engine work

Since 2010 I've designed and maintained my own cross‑platform C++ game engine at NJLIGames, my studio. It runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android, and more than ten original games and VR experiences have shipped on it. When you own an engine you own all of it: OpenGL ES rendering and shaders, 3D math, physics integration, memory management, multithreading, asset pipelines, and the CMake and CI setup that keeps five platforms building from one codebase. The engine and its platform variants are public at github.com/njligames.

Play something I built

Both of these are my own games. I designed, built, and run them by myself. They're free, with no account and no install.

Musicianle ↗ Proven Sudoku ↗

• Musicianle is a daily music guessing game in the Wordle tradition. You see a musician's discography with the names masked and get eight guesses to name them, one puzzle a day. The C++20 backend serves the whole corpus from memory, the client is Flutter, and the data comes from a pipeline over MusicBrainz and Wikidata. It's live at musicianle.com.
• Proven Sudoku is a daily sudoku where every board is proved solvable by logic alone and graded by the hardest technique it actually needs. Boards are generated deterministically on the device, so everyone in the world gets the same three puzzles each day. Behind it is a documented knowledge base of 122 solving techniques. It's live at provensudoku.com, and mobile builds are in progress.

NJLIGames has also built games under contract: Yappy Birds for Navitude, and the ELIA Typing Challenge, an accessibility typing game for ELIA Life's tactile ELIA Frames alphabet. Those and my own BlasterBots are no longer in the app stores, but the BlasterBots and Yappy Birds source history is still on GitHub.

What I bring to a game project

• Gameplay features in C++ and Lua inside AAA codebases, shipped on production deadlines at 343 Industries and Visual Concepts.
• Engine and systems programming (rendering, 3D math, physics integration, memory, multithreading) in an engine I've owned since 2010.
• Deterministic generation. My daily games build identical boards on every platform from a shared seed, so everyone plays the same puzzle.
• Work on tight hardware: seven titles on GBA, DS, and DSiWare, where memory budgets are counted in kilobytes and megabytes.
• Asset pipelines, build systems, CI, and automated testing across five platforms.

Verify these credits

• My MobyGames page has independently maintained credits for Halo Infinite (Campaign and Multiplayer), NBA 2K22, MLB 2K10, Petz: Catz 2, and both Winx Club titles.
• The Halo Infinite official credits on Halo Waypoint list me under Software Engineering.
• Game Developer's Road to the IGF interview covers Glow Artisan, winner of Best Mobile Game Design at IGF Mobile 2010.
• The full work history is on the home page, and the game‑focused version is my game development resume (PDF, Word).