Marlon Gilliam

Built the first prototype and its core systems: physics-based structure building on 2D physics, graph pathfinding that updates as the world changes, and a job management system for game actors.

2D radiance-cascade global illumination, moved into a deferred lighting path on Unity's Render Graph. Light shafts, normal-mapped sprites, soft shadows and projected sprite shadows. Custom lighting, fullscreen and sprite shaders in HLSL and Shader Graph.

Multithreaded pathfinding and actor jobs. Emergent hazard simulations: gas and smoke, particle-based fluids, collapsing terrain and debris, and tremors.

Cut a fullscreen GPU pass from 2.2 ms to under 0.4 ms and saved 2–3 ms on a lighting shader. Reduced draw calls and overdraw, and removed CPU spikes by moving heavy work onto jobs and off the main thread.

Sandbox tools for testing simulations, a play-mode light-authoring window, character rig and character-creator tools, and GPU profiling workflows using RenderDoc and PIX.

Built Xbox startup, user sign-in, and lobby and matchmaking integration. Implemented cross-platform multiplayer services, including parties and invites. Centralised platform-specific logic into a shared layer across stores.

Fixed an Xbox achievements crash, kept Xbox and PlayFab lobbies in sync, and fixed a cross-play invite issue that was failing certification, shipped in a patch.

Fixed crashes in the live game on both the servers and the game client, across consoles and PC.

Wrote PlayFab backend logic and Azure Functions for ranked brackets with promotion and demotion, ranked matchmaking, server allocation, leaderboards, rewards, item grants and win streaks.

Owned CPU and GPU performance on all platforms, using platform and Unity profilers with the technical artists. Built tools that automate CPU and GPU profiling of release builds on device. Set and held performance targets for new features across departments.

Optimised multithreaded, job-based rollback networked physics. Reduced packet sizes through leaner data structures, and cut physics cost by simplifying simulation and hot functions.

Created the multiplayer bots that run server-side, designing and developing how their systems work. Added tunable parameters so their difficulty can be raised and lowered dynamically on the fly.

Worked heavily on the first-time user experience, building custom configurable UIs that could be changed by altering data on PlayFab, so different first-time experiences could be tested.

Did all of the game's analytics, and worked on our data platform to build reports on the game's performance.

Xbox packaging, asset and level validation, and streaming asset management.