Game development: shipped titles, engines, and original games

Shipped titles

• Halo Infinite (343 Industries, 2021, Xbox Series X|S and Windows). Contributed to gameplay in C++ and Lua. Microsoft reported more than 20 million players by January 2022, the largest launch in the franchise's history. I am credited under Software Engineering in the game's official credits.
• NBA 2K22 (Visual Concepts / 2K, 2021, PlayStation 5). Developed in‑game features, gameplay mechanics, and systems in C++ on an annual sports title that Take‑Two reported at more than 10 million units sold‑in. Publicly 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 at Powerhead. Winner of Best Mobile Game Design at the 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile awards and a finalist for the grand prize. Nintendo Life scored it 9/10, Microsoft named it in the Windows Phone 7 Xbox LIVE launch lineup, and fifteen years later it still made 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). Shipped a fully licensed MLB title on handheld hardware; credited for audio programming on the DS version. Watch IGN's DS gameplay.
• Did It Myself ABC123 (Powerhead Games, 2010, Nintendo DSiWare). Programming on an early‑childhood educational game, the first DSiWare title rated EC by the ESRB. 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 title in Ubisoft's Petz franchise. 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, working inside the constraints of GBA and DS hardware. Watch DS gameplay of Quest for the Codex and Mission Enchantix.

Engine work

Since 2010 I have architected and maintained a proprietary cross‑platform C++ game engine at NJLIGames, my own studio. It targets Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android and has powered more than ten original games and VR experiences. That work covers the full stack an engine programmer owns: rendering with OpenGL ES and shaders, 3D math and physics integration, memory management, multithreading, asset pipelines, and the build systems (CMake, CI) that keep five platforms shipping 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 original games, designed, engineered, and operated solo. No account, no install, free.

Musicianle ↗ Proven Sudoku ↗

• Musicianle. A daily music guessing game in the Wordle tradition: name the musician from their masked discography, one puzzle a day, eight guesses. C++20 backend serving the corpus from memory, Flutter client, and a data pipeline over MusicBrainz and Wikidata. Live at musicianle.com.
• Proven Sudoku. A daily sudoku where every board is proved solvable by logic alone and graded by the hardest technique it actually requires. Boards are generated deterministically on device, so everyone in the world plays the same three puzzles each day, backed by a documented knowledge base of 122 solving techniques. Live at provensudoku.com, with mobile builds 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 titles and my own BlasterBots have since left the app stores, but the BlasterBots and Yappy Birds source history lives on GitHub.

What I bring to a game project

• Gameplay engineering. C++ and Lua feature work inside AAA codebases, shipped under production deadlines at 343 Industries and Visual Concepts.
• Engine and systems programming. Rendering, 3D math, physics integration, memory, and multithreading, proven by an engine I have owned end to end since 2010.
• Deterministic systems. My live daily games generate identical boards on every platform from a shared seed, so everyone plays the same puzzle.
• Constrained hardware. Seven titles shipped on GBA, DS, and DSiWare, where memory budgets are measured in kilobytes and megabytes.
• Tooling and pipelines. Asset pipelines, build systems, CI, and automated testing across five platforms.

Verify these credits

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