Hello, I'm Chris Schmelzle

I'm a Colorado based Software Engineer, primarily focused on App Development, Interactive Experiences and Gaming.

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"Show the utmost contempt for shoji"

It's a term I picked up in graduate school, and it's one that I've embraced throughout my career. Shoji, as you may be aware, are Japanese room dividers consisting of lightweight, easily destructable sheets. While they may obscure your view into another room, they do not prevent a motivated individual from simply crashing through them to see what's on the other side.

With rapid changes in technology and development, it's easy to remain complacent inside our bubbles, afraid to burst through the shoji to see what's on the other side. As I embark on the next chapter of my career, I'm not beholden by my comfort zone or past experience, but rather actively seeking out new and exciting opportunities that enhance my existing toolset, whether that be in cross-platform App Development, Gaming, Web, AR/VR or ML/AI - with zero regard for shoji!

In my free time, you can find me enjoying the natural beauty of Colorado, building personal projects, prolifically skiing, and hanging out with my very good boy - Sawyer (obligatory photo below!).


Career

Storyboarder

Founding Software Engineer November 2023 - Present

  • Developing Storyboarder, a new generation tool and platform that enables anyone to create, buy, and sell webcomics.

Ronday Technologies

Lead Software Engineer July 2021 - August 2023

  • Developed Ronday - a Web based spatial Audio/Video communication platform for remote work and social events with an emphasis on genuine presence.
  • Lead Engineer responsible for Unity stack, core user experience (camera, controls, interactions), Unity user interface, performance and rendering, video playback, and application settings. [C#, TypeScript, React, CSS]
  • Managed a team of Unity developers, artists and UX designers in an Agile/Scrum development methodology using Jira/Confluence. Actively led code reviews and best practices, development workflows, bug triage, and feature release cadence.
  • Mentored artists and fellow engineers on Unity best practices related to performance and rendering, including draw call batching, material optimizations, texture compression, mesh level of detail, occlusion, and render pipelines to allow the application to run performantly on WebGL on low-end PCs and Tablets. [C#, TypeScript]
  • Built several full-stack systems to address business objectives and increase adoption, including customizable wallboards, in-engine web views, robust room security, projecting video to surface, teleporting between spaces and dynamic room customization. [C#, TypeScript, React, CSS]
  • Individual contributor on several large-scale stack refactors, including replacing the existing mesh networking (Photon) with a dedicated server (DarkRift2) and the migration from a standalone Unity application to a React-based web application, significantly improving trust and accessability to the platform. [C#, TypeScript, React, CSS]
  • Implemented a performant and extensible messaging bridge between the Browser/Unity layers driving UX, replication, customization and interactivity, which significantly reduced the amount of tech debt incurred though moving to a Web platform. [C#, TypeScript, React, CSS]
  • Created a highly extensible profiling/debugging system in both Unity and React that facilitated displaying real-time information about the application state and performance, which led to a massive improvement in stability and bug identification. [C#, TypeScript, React, CSS]
  • Optimized the renderer to allow for high user counts by leveraging React and HTML5 canvas to render performant video overlays, significantly increasing the number of concurrent video avatars displayed. [React, TypeScript, CSS]
  • Designed and implemented Full-Stack casual games and experiences to delight and entertain users such as Capture the Flag, Bean Bag Toss, Roulette, Blackjack and Slot Machines. [C#, React, TypeScript, CSS]
  • Prototyped leveraging Generative AI to facilitate dynamic space creation and customization. [JavaScript, Lit, Three.js, A-Frame, ChatGPT]

Deck Nine

Senior Software Engineer November 2018 - July 2021

  • Primary platform engineer on Life is Strange - True Colors, a narrative adventure game using Unreal Engine 4 released on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox One X, Switch and Stadia.
  • Working closely with artists and designers, defined supported graphical features, memory budgets and asset pipelines for all supported platforms at different scalability levels. Optimized memory usage to allow a large open-world setting. [C++]
  • Provided graphics programming and debugging and modified UE4 source code to allow custom functionality of several key graphical features, such as post-processing and volumetric lighting, yielding a high fidelity cinematic experience. [C++, HLSL]
  • Created state, pathfinding, locomotion, attachment, look-at, and other extensible NPC AI systems to facilitate dynamic character interactions which resulted in an immersive, lifelike game setting. [C++]
  • CPU/GPU optimization and hitch prevention with emphasis on load balancing, concurrency, mesh level of detail levels, instancing, occlusion culling, lighting/shadows, ray tracing and post processing across a variety of platforms. [C++]
  • Refined animation blending system to provide lifelike interactions with objects in the world for both the player and NPC actors, which improved smoothness and believability of character actions and movement. [C++]
  • Worked to bring the Switch version of the game to a first-playable state. [C++]
  • Added key functionality to support proprietary in-house cinematic toolset. [C++]
  • Additional graphics, performance and bug fixing on Life is Strange - Remastered Collection. [C++]

Telltale Games

Lead Platform Fidelity Engineer August 2015 - September 2018

  • Lead Engineer responsible for visual fidelity across a wide variety of consoles, desktop and mobile devices. Primary point of contact for addressing problems related to materials, mesh/skeleton LOD, texture and animation compression.
  • Addressed memory and performance constraints by modifying rendering features to scale based on platform capabilities, with a heavy emphasis on optimizations for iOS and Android. Key contributor in porting from OpenGL to Metal for OSX/iOS platform. [C++, Java, Objective-C, Swift]
  • Initiated cross-platform pre-production stress testing to determine engine capabilities and performance constraints for all supported quality permutations and spearheaded a Unit Testing initiative to ensure stable Tool deployments for the development team, yielding a significant decrease in pre-release crunch.
  • Implemented several real-time shader debugging, performance monitoring and granular memory scoping tools which simplified bug identification and improved release cadence. [C++, HLSL]
  • Facilitated several optimizations to the distributed shader build system, allowing special debug-only paths and symbols to be exported for debugging artifacts/GPU crashes more expediently while maintaining a large HLSL shader pipeline and converting them at build-time into platform variants. [C++, HLSL, GLSL, PSSL, Metal]
  • Revised memory management system to prevent synchronous loads and choppy gameplay when compared to previously shipped titles and completely refactored the existing asset preloading system to better suit the expanded capabilities of the engine. [C++]
  • Expanded rendering capabilities such as HDR, 4K console resolutions, compute skinning, indirect draw, multiple render targets, pix/razor tagging, shader preloading, gamma correction and stencil buffering. Assisted in porting core engine functionality to DirectX 11 and Windows 10, as well as allowing the engine to compile for 64 bit architectures. [C++]
  • Made key optimizations to the Telltale Tool regarding property sets, asynchronous file loading, draw call batching, thread affinity, lip-sync accuracy and built a system for importing/exporting player navigation meshes. [C++]
  • Key contributor firefighting critical release blocking issues with emphasis on crashes, DLC, patches, in-app purchases, controller input, resource priority and choices. [C++, Lua]
  • Provided mentorship and best practices for QA, choreographers, lighting artists, animators and content programmers to maximize release cadence under tight deadlines.
  • Series shipped:

Machine Zone

Senior Software Engineer May 2012 - June 2015

  • Implemented core engine technology and tools used by the game and art teams in support of Game of War and Mobile Strike. [C++, Lua, Objective-C, Java, Python]
  • Championed the effort to upgrade the Game of War engine from OpenGL ES 1.1 to OpenGL ES 2.0. [C++, GLSL]
  • Created a dynamic tutorial system affording designers and data scientists granular control over a user's first time experience, which had a dramatically positive impact on monetization. [C++, Lua, PHP, SQL]
  • Built core game features such as Emoji, Mail, City View, World View and Casino as a full-stack engineer. [Lua, PHP, SQL, Objective-C]
  • Designed and produced several Cocoa tools - Map Editor, Particle Editor, 2D/Vector Animation, Shaders, Animation and Emoji to allow game designers direct access to mutate game content. [C++, Objective-C]
  • Wrote Maya exporter for Mesh and Skeletal Animations. [C++, Python]
  • Enhanced HTML-like UI markup language Librocket by adding new decorators, events, text effects, scrolling marquees, render to texture and shader effects. [C++, GLSL]
  • Added support for a shader-based post processing system for use by both in-game components and UI. [C++, GLSL]
  • Established asset check-in pipeline for art (textures, meshes) using Python and Perforce triggers. [Python]
  • Tackled on-call and customer support issues to prevent exploits and revenue damaging bugs from persisting.
  • Implemented particle and shader effects used by game and art teams as a Technical Artist.

Terminal Reality

Programmer Feb 2009 - March 2012

  • Primary focus during development of Def Jam Rapstar was to work with designers and artists to execute the desired visual aesthetics during core gameplay and throughout the UI at both shippable quality and performance, with special emphasis on the Wii - using material, particle systems, and low-level rendering approaches. Also performed general gameplay and UI programming . [C++, HLSL]
  • Hooked up Xbox Live and PlayStation Network services and facilitated interfacing with cross platform leaderboards and friend list functionality for both [C++].
  • Primary focus during development of Kinect Star Wars was the fulfillment of core gameplay functionality in Dance and Star Fighter modes. Included character rendering, stage lighting, particle and material effects, post processing, scripted events, animation and ingame UI. [C++]
  • Provided supporting engineering efforts to the Pod Racing mode. Added dynamic weather and ground effects, prototyped NPC behaviors and course obstacles, and hooked up several achievements. [C++]
  • Used the Kinect depth image to create player silhouettes and implemented photo capturing functionality across all modes. [C++, HLSL]

Education

Southern Methodist University

Masters Candidate in Interactive Technology 2009

Clemson University

Bachelor of Science - Computer Science 2006

Skills

Platforms

Windows, OSX, Linux, Unix

Mobile

iOS, Android, Kindle

Consoles

Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PS3, PS4, PS5, Wii, Switch, Stadia

Languages

C, C++, C#, Java, Objective-C, Swift, JavaScript / TypeScript, Python, SQL

Development

Visual Studio, JetBrains, XCode, Android Studio

Web

React, Node.js, Lit.js, Three.js, R3F.js, Next.js, PHP, CSS, HTML5, WebRTC, Electron, cURL

Networking

Sockets, TCP/IP, Photon, Apache, Nginx, DarkRift2

Backend

AWS, Firebase, Postgres, PocketBase, Neon, Prisma, ASP.net, SQLite, SignalR, .Net Core

Source Control

Git, Subversion, Perforce, Mercurial, PlasticSCM

CI/CD

GitHub, Docker, Jenkins, Concourse, Buildbot

Profiling

RenderDoc, Pix, Razor, Chrome Tools

Engines

Unity, Unreal, Telltale, Valve Source

Rendering

Metal, DirectX, OpenGL, WebGL, GNM/GNMX

Shading

GLSL, HLSL, PSSL, Assembly

Scripting

Lua, ActionScript, UnrealScript

UI

Cocoa, Win32, UIKit, Qt, Scaleform

Project Management

Jira, Confluence, Notion, Slack, Figma

Modeling

Maya, 3D Studio Max, Blender

Audio

Fmod, Wwise, SDL

Imaging

Photoshop, Gimp

A Few Things I've Worked On...

Personal Projects

Hello Moose

Founder Ongoing

  • First Project - 2D/3D Box2D powered infinite runner game called Ski Bums
  • Wrote full-featured cross platform engine [C++, Objective-C, Swift, GLSL, Metal]
  • Platform agnostic renderer - OpenGL (Windows), OpenGL ES 2.0 and Metal (iOS)
  • Leverages ECS architecture for components and json reflection system for serialization
  • Created a Windows-based editor for creating levels, materials, entities, particles and UI
  • Game logic written in Lua and bound to underlying engine via LuaBind
  • Unlockable achievements and leaderboards via GameCenter integration
  • Ad-supported monetization via TapJoy and InApp Purchases
  • Source/Demo available upon request