Tim Leader
Crafting robust and performant systems for gaming, servers, tools, and more, with a wealth of knowledge and experience across multiple domains.
Featured Projects
AFAR - Rush
Casual mobile racing game, built with fast iteration and live operations in mind.
Avakin Life
Online social world with over 250+ million downloads with 7+ million monthly active users.
BigFest
Construction and management simulation game about music festivals, similar to theme park, etc...
Avoid
Stylized arcade game, with competitive local / same screen multiplayer, built for Xbox Live.
Bounce
2D side scrolling Physics platformer, frustratingly fun, built for Xbox Live.
Cave Mapping
Taking laser scans of the Caves under Nottingham and converting them into a format appropriate for realtime rendering, for virtual tours and such like.
Unity Automation Playground
An easy to use, end to end solution for automated testing on Unity3D mobile games, will build, test and run on a device.
GameBoy Advance - Tech Demo
This demo is vertical slice built from the ground up, point and click adventure style demo with 3d entities over pre-rendered 2d backgrounds.
Nintendo 64 - Tech Demo
Tech Demo + Game Engine for the Nintendo 64, with a focus on developing my skills in writing simple yet performance and memory aware code.
Soundbox - Raspberry Pi Pico
Embedded device to animate LED light strips alongside audio playback, matching the LED light strips to the various frequencies / ampitude of the audio wave.
Outrun - Android Port
Ported an existing C++ project to Android, using the NDK, SDL2 and OpenGL ES 2.0.
Frequency Texture Mapping - Research
Research into an alternative approach to texture mapping, to reduce aliasing introduced from texture sampling.
Professional Journey
Lead Core Tech Developer
As this was a relatively new company, I had a very dervsified role, from building core infrastructure to analysing data collected by our game and almost anything inbetween.
Technical Director (Client)
In this role I worked closely with the Head of Development to plan out future team structure, refine various processes, build tech roadmaps, spearheaded investigations into obscure crashes, and provided technical assistance / direction where appropriate. I also kept hands on where appropriate through applying optimizations, crash fixes or putting together prototypes.
Lead Client Developer
My time in this role was split between client-side network programming and leading the client side product / feature and tech engineers.
Lead Core Tech Developer
My time in this role was split between leading a small team of engineers to advance the client side core tech throughout the Avakin product, while also continuing development on the realtime servers for Avakin, adding features working through scalability issues.
Programmer
This role involved mentoring of new members to the team and communicating with the art and management team to develop content pipelines and tuition around the game capabilities and game engine. I was also responsible for the realtime server development for Avakin, adding features and working through scalability issues.
Junior Programmer
This role involved quickly adapting myself to the team's standards and gaining a good understanding of the codebase. My focus here was on the BigFest project I was responsible for developing new features, fixing bugs and maintaining the codebase.
Technical Director
As co-founder of this small Independent game studio, I mainly focused around core development, including core graphics programming. Though the role also extended to develop the company website, professional networking at attended events, team management, research and project management.
Undergraduate Researcher
This role involved working with the university to research and develop a pipeline for taking 3D laser scans and converting them into a format which could be used for realtime rendering. This involved a lot of work with the Point Cloud Library and OpenGL.
Bachelor's in Computer Science
About Me
Tim Leader
I always strive to advance my own knowledge, so that I can work at the very forefront of technological innovation and development. I'm keen and interested in learning new technologies or techniques, in particular lower level systems and optimizations, and have become a very quick learner and therefore an not phased when faced with a unknown technology. I work calmly in a high pace / high stress working situations.
I have a vast amount of experience of working with live, heavily networked and content heavy products. I enjoy throwing myself into any area of development and help those around me so that we may reach the best possible solution, not just the best technically but the best when balanced against business value, maintenance cost and flexibility. I have recruited and built various tech teams, onboarded them and provided them with technical direction.
Programming Languages
C, C++, C#, Golang, Java, Zig, Assembly (ARM), Javascript, Python, SQL, GLSL, LUA
Game Engines
Unity3D (3.4 -> 2022.3), Godot, (worked with a number of other engines in non-commerical capacity)
Tools
Git, SVN, P4, Visual Studio, Rider, Intellij, VS Code, PyCharm, XCode, Android Studio