Tim Conkling

273A SANCHEZ ST

SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94114

347-229-5178

tconkling@gmail.com

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Commercial Game Development

Miss Management - Lead Programmer

Miss Management is a time management game that tasks players with running an office staffed by neurotic employees. I worked closely with the game’s designers to create a generic, data-driven system capable of supporting the personalities of the game’s various characters, their interactions, and the level-specific goals that the player must complete to progress in the game. Miss Management’s narrative is heavily inspired by television sitcoms, and features both interactive and non-interactive cutscenes. I designed the cutscene system to be usable by non-programmers; all cutscenes were scripted by the game’s designers.

At the outset of Miss Management’s production, I began designing and implementing a reusable, extendable 2D scene graph, which was conspicuously absent from Gamelab’s tool set. My scene graph implementation is, most importantly, easy to both use and extend. It adheres to standards already established in the game framework that Gamelab’s programmers use, and it uses a format that can be described entirely in both XML and C++. I reimplemented the entire suite of GUI widgets that the team had been using in games so that non-game UI as well as in-game objects could be managed with the scene graph. My implementation has since become a core component of every new C++ game that the company has developed.

Miss Management was released to excellent reviews and sales.

Experimental Game for the Nintendo Wii - Prototype / Engine Programmer (Not released)

I was one of a small team of Gamelab programmers and designers that worked on a Wii game that did not ultimately progress past the prototype stage. I ported Orbital, the game framework that Gamelab uses for C++ game development, to the Wii, and worked on a few game mechanics that involved the Wii’s motion-sensing controller. The game was a major technical departure for Gamelab, as nobody on the development team had been involved in console development before. Though most members of the team, including myself, were dividing our time among several other production projects, we developed a working prototype in just a few months.

Shopmania - Lead Programmer

Shopmania was Gamelab’s first C++ game (previous titles had been created primarily with Macromedia Director). One of my early tasks as the company’s first C++ programmer was to find a 2D framework that Shopmania and future C++ titles would be developed with. I evaluated several and settled on Mind Control Software’s Orbital framework. Orbital has since become Gamelab’s development platform for all C++ projects. I’ve been the person at Gamelab responsible for managing the technical relationship with Mind Control, and many of my bug fixes, enhancements, and suggestions have been integrated back into the product.

Hobbyist Software Development

Gnomez Engine - Designer and Programmer

Gnomez is a 2D sprite-based game engine for the Mac that I worked on for several years, beginning in high school and continuing through college. It’s entirely data-driven, and includes a sprite editor and level builder. The engine is fully scriptable: each game entity is driven by its own Lua script. An extensible eventing system allows entities to define, create, and respond to events in order to communicate with the engine and other entities. All content (art, animations, levels, and Lua script) can be dynamically reloaded by the engine while a game is in progress, reducing the time required for asset integration.

Movie of a game in progress (DivX AVI, 1.7 MB)
(This really is my work. I recreated the first level from Super Mario Brothers 3 because I felt it contained good baseline functionality to shoot for. Everything you see here is driven by scripts run in the hosted Lua interpreter.)

WindowDragon - Designer and Programmer

WindowDragon is a “haxie” that patches Mac OS X applications as they are launched, and allows users to drag and resize windows by clicking anywhere in a window’s structure, instead of being limited to just the title bar and resize handle. I released the first version of WindowDragon for free in November, 2004. In June, 2006, I released an update (also free) that brought compatibility to Intel Macs.

WindowDragon has since become open source, under the BSD license.