Consulting and Contracting

Responsibilities included setting up a development team in Texas for this California-based company and directing the creation of procedural content generation tools and techniques for their game TUG.

Mobile inventory system. Responsibilities include technical consultant to the programming team, adviser on setting and maintaining business communication structure between development, sales, and management. One of the things I got them to do was keep offsite backups, which is just as well because the place burned to the ground in 2007. The lead programmer still had the software, but the company had no fire insurance so it folded.

Responsibilities included design and analysis of algorithms for the core technology of an internet barter site. The company crashed and burned at the start of the Great Dot Com Crash. It had a product ready to release but had burned through round 2 of venture capital funding and investors at the time were very shy of investing in internet based companies.

Developer of TrapWords, a word game using hexagonal tiles. It never was sold, but you can find it for free online. There is also a board game version, but I had nothing to do with it.

Developer for several command-and-control applications.

1. Roboski ROS (US Navy). ROS is the Remote Operator's Station for the Ship Deployable Surface Target system (SDST) from Robotek Engineering.
2. NetROS (SCORE). NetROS added real-time reporting of target positions to SCORE's air/sea monitoring system by UDP/IP.
3. WinCop (SCORE). Prototype for a land vehicle monitoring system.

For more details, see the ROS and NetROS Help file.

G-Nome. I didn't get paid and they ignored my advice, but I got listed in the credits. OK, it only says "Special Thanks To", but hey, it's a credit. 7th Level crashed and burned the same year.

In 1996 I finished a DOS game called Subhunt with the help of some students in LARC. My idea was that we could fund the lab with the income from shareware games. It failed miserably, but it was a lot of fun to work on. I think I started working on it in 1994 or 1995. It was released in 1997 under contract by WebFoot Games in the US and Spectrum Pacific Publishing in Australia and the Pacific Rim. The game is now orphaned, which means you can find it for free online in some archives of old games. You can read more about it here.