Carlos Garrido

Role: Gameplay Programmer, Level Designer
Size: Solo
Skills: Interaction Systems, Blueprint Interfaces, Production
Engine/Platforms: Unreal Engine 5.3, Tortoise SVN
Duration: Jan. 2024 – Present

For my Level Design Capstone project, I develop an entirely new game to expound my rapid programming and game design skills. In just one week I managed to implement, playtest, and polish all of the sneaking, detection, strangling, and enemy mechanics the game has. This allowed me to lock them down early in development to focus on the numerous levels the game has. I intend to extensively iterate on and publish this game around early May - Jun 2024.

• Latest Progress (in-game screenshots)

Role: Online & Gameplay Programmer
Size: 4
Skills: Multiplayer Programming, Client-Server Model
Engine/Platforms: Unreal Engine 5.3, Tortoise SVN
Duration: Jan. 2024 – Present

For my last GAM project at DigiPen, I ventured into the challenging and ingenious world of online multiplayer programming. In our Oxygen-resource-based first-person-shooter OMG!!! (Online Multiplayer Game) I am the sole programmer responsible for online implementation and support for all gameplay, match hosting, and Server-Client systems. Through extensive research and hours of reading documentation, in just a few weeks I was able to create, launch, and develop an online multiplayer sandbox, in which our team can play together through a shared LAN connection. I have learned so much regarding implementing a Dedicated Server game in UE5, and continue to explore and implement support for all clients through efficient implementation of replication, RPC's, and synchronization.

Role: Teaching Assistant
Class Size: 80
Skills: Mentorship, Teaching Gameplay Programming, Debugging, and Source control
Engine/Platforms: Unreal Engine 5, Tortoise SVN, MS Teams
Duration: Aug. 2023 – Apr. 2024

Working 6-8 hours/week I have the opportunity to assist newcomer game artists in learning the basics of Unreal Engine and guide them through the challenges of working in a game team. As the CS TA, I often found myself helping students 1-on-1 with gameplay programming challenges, debugging, and teaching source control essentials. I am also passionate and eager to hear all the team's pitches and ideas to give them constructive feedback moving forward.

Role: Design Lead & Level Designer
Team Size: 11
Skills: Leadership, Production, Unreal Engine 5
Engine/Platforms: Unreal Engine 5, GIT, Azure DevOps
Duration: Sept. 2022 – Dec 2023

INFESTATION is an Unreal Engine 5 first-person horror game set in an desolate space station. As Design Lead, I managed a team of 5 Narrative, Level & UI Designers through 3 semesters, as part of a wider 11-person game team. A year into development & after 50+ play tests, I led the redevelopment of the game’s levels to create a more guided and immersive experience.

• Click here for an in-depth exposition of all my contributions for this project.

Role: PCG Programmer / System Designer
Team Size: Individual
Skills: PCG Programming, Unreal Engine 5.2
Engine/Platforms: Unreal Engine 5.2 PCG Plugin
Duration: Sept. 2023 – Dec 2023

I made a PCG city that generates through a single spline! With the release of the PCG plugin for Unreal Engine 5.2, I decided to pursue an independent study to get my hands dirty with the experimental tech! Here I dive deep into different techniques used to create various forms of content that all work together in a nice demo showcasing PCG terrain, buildings, and a nested PCG network combining it all into one massive project.

Role: Instructor, 3D Game Dev
Class Sizes: 4 (ages 13-17)
Skills: Teaching, Debugging, Mentorship, Gameplay Programming
Engine/Platforms: Unreal Engine 5, Unity
Duration: Jun. 12th 2023 – Aug. 12th 2023

Open World was an amazing summer experience where I got to teach teenagers (13 - 17) the basics of how to program their own 3D games in Unreal Engine 5, and Unity throughout 2-week intensive blocks. This was a full-time experience where I had the opportunity to pass on my learnings at DigiPen to future game developers, aiding them through the challenges of designing a good architecture for their unique game mechanics.

DOOM (2016) - SnapMap Editor

For one of my clases I was tasked with designing combat encounters inside of DOOM's SnapMap Editor, it was my first experience working with professionally developed tools in a polished game engine, and I was able to explore and playtest numerous encounters in this 5 minute experience.

Autodesk Maya: 3D Modeling & Texturing

This semester I took on the challenge of learning how to 3D model from scratch. In this course I
learned how to model structures, a full organic body, and UV unwrapping.

Traffic Jam AI Pathfinding Simulator

In this city traffic simulation, I was responsible for the AI's "SpeedMap". It represents the different speeds of all tiles on the map and the different colored cars have different priorities when pathfinding using A* ("A-star"). If I could re-visit this project I would like to add support so that the vehicles can update their pathfinding at runtime depending on the location of other vehicles, like applications such as Waze, and Google Maps do.

• Video link

Action List Menu UI

This UI programming demo has a fully customizable and data-driven functional poker-like UI and Menu. I implemented this in C# scripts in Unity. Everything is driven by action lists, which execute visual actions in a safe, user-driven order.

• Video link