Hi, I’m Arvind. Welcome to my portfolio!
Education
I’ve been passionate about making games since I was a child. Starting in high school, I taught myself C++ by reading textbooks and making small games. I made my first full game in 2006, a trading simulator in Borland C++ for my school’s end-of-year project.
After high school, I went to university for my Bachelor’s in Computer Science. During this time, I was active in the Half-Life 2 modding community, most notably contributing as a programmer in Dystopia, a multiplayer cyberpunk themed total conversion of Half-Life 2.
Indie
More importantly, in my second year, I started my own game studio. For almost a decade, I was the programmer, game designer and studio head at PyrodactyI Games, a multinational team of skilled and motivated people. I wrote my own game engine in C++, SDL and OpenGL (see the Github link above), which was used in five released and two unreleased projects. Here’s the notable ones:
- Good Robot: Procedurally generated shoot ’em up/rogue-lite hybrid.
- Unrest: Award-winning story driven role playing game set in ancient India.
- Will Fight for Food: Beat ’em up/RPG hybrid with a conversation system that relies on tone and body language in addition to dialog trees.
- A.Typical RPG: Slice of life adventure game that has football, dance-off and exam mini-games.
- The Red Stone: Turn based tactical RPG with systemic unit generation.
- Zombies On Demand: resource management/strategy game made in 48 hours during Train Jam 2017.
Teaching
I’ve always been passionate about teaching and helping students learn how to make games. To this end, I was a Game Design & Programming Trainer at DSK International Campus, Pune for an year, where I helped students hone their game dev skills.
Industry
As Pyrodactyl was coming to an end, I wanted to work in the game industry in order to further learn and hone my craft as a programmer, while hopefully contributing with my knowledge of game design and project management.
For close to three years, I worked at Ubisoft Abu Dhabi as a Gameplay Programmer, where I wrote client and server side code for Growtopia, a cross-platform MMO with a player driven economy. Currently, I work at Wolcen Studio as a Senior Gameplay Programmer / Associate Lead. I work on Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, an action RPG made in CryEngine 3, and an unannounced project made in Unreal Engine 5.