Christian Ferrario - Game Programmer

BioProfessionnal ExperienceSchool ProjectsPersonal ProjectsCode ExamplesResume

Welcome to chris-ferrario.com and thank you for visiting.

Who am I?

My name is Christian Ferrario, I am an Italian-American 26 year old game programmer who speaks English, French and Italian.

I have studied at In’Tech INFO in Paris, France where I majored in Software Engeneering. ( BAC+3 )

I really enjoy learning new things and have been feeding on game programming books and online tutorials throughout my education and career to be able to take my projects a little further every time.

I now have three years of professional experience under my belt working with developers DeValley Entertainment, VG Creator ( Nintendo DS ) in Paris and Gameloft in New York in 2008 and in Montreal in 2010 as well as experience on seven projects that are sold commercially, and many many more on my spare time.

What Am I doing?

I am currently an iPhone programmer for top shelf 3D iPhone games for Gameloft in their Montreal Studio such as the soon to be released GT Racing: Motor Academy. I am currently not entertaining any other employment offers.

What I have done?

I have worked on five commercial projects with DeValley Entertainement during 2007 and 2008.

Nowhere (nominated for best french mobile game of 2007)
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Landers (nominated for best french mobile game of 2008)
Holy Wars
Crash of the Titans

I also worked on one mobile game for Gameloft in New York in 2008.

Spooks: The Mobile Game

During 2009, in France, I built the game engine as the main programmer for :

My Hero: Astronaut ( NDS game sadly cancelled after being shut down during late debugging because of external finance reasons )

In late 2009, I moved to Montreal, Canada to join the Gameloft team and worked on:

GT Racing: Motor Company ( iPhone - iPad )

Please feel free to check out these projects on the Professionnal Experience tab of this portfolio.

What I can already do

Most of my ready-to-use experience is in C/C++ game programming, with a strong background in Java Midp heavily optimized programming. Having been a main programmer on three different projects, I have touched various aspects of game programming and architecture design such as engine construction, physics, AI, fine tuned gameplays, audio, animation, menus, portability, localization... I also work a lot on the side or in between projects on prototypes or tools to make my job easier. I have been gaining more and more experience with low level programming and optimization, I also enjoy debugging very much.

I am also a very polished team player and play very well with the subtilities of human interaction having worked on many team programming projects in different countries and in different languages but also being on a baseball team for about a decade including some coaching experience as well as being an official umpire.

I know that I can be a very valuable adition to your dev team, but don't take it from me, listen to Chuck!

GT Racing: Motor Academy (iPhone/iPad)

GT Racing: Motor Academy is a game develloped by Gameloft for the iPhone/iPad. In this 3D racing game you can drive more than 100 luxury cars while customizing them for better performance and race them on the 14 official racing tracks around the world. I was part of a large team of programmers who worked hard to realease this high quality game.

Official website : http://www.gtracingmotoracademy.com/

Two official trailers:

My Hero: Astronaut (Nintendo DS)

My Hero: Astronaut was to be released by Majesco in the US as a 3D space exploration game for Nintendo DS. The game had been anounced and and had been presented at the 2009 E3. It has however had to be cancelled after the devolloper had to close their doors for financial reasons.

I was main programmer on this project which required the building of a brand new game engine on top of the company's base library wrapper of the DS functions.

The game is the second one presented in this video :

Spooks: The Mobile Game (Java Midp)

Spooks the Mobile game is a J2ME Midp 2.0 Click and Play Game developed by Gameloft.

During this project I helped the Lead game designer with scripting while I also helped the two programmers debug the game before going gold.

This game follows the adventures of the famous british MI5 TV spies.
Keith Andrew's review on Pocket Gamer :

Pocket Gamer.co.uk Score : 7/10, Bronze Award

Gameplay video :

The Spiderwick Chronicles (Java Midp)

The Spiderwick Chronicles is a J2ME Midp 2.0 Adventure Game developed by the French company DeValley Entertainment and published by Vivendi Universal Games Mobile.

I was the lead programmer for the development of this project.

This game was created in anticipation of the upcoming Paramount movie and was a licensed product designed to target the same audience that the movie and Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black's novels appeal to, such as younger audiences.

Vivendi Universal Games Mobile came to us with this project after we had finished Crash of the Titans, around August 2007 it seemed at the time like a good project to look into but one of the demands was very special: they would need the game to be developed in two months with one extra month of debugging, about half the time we usually spend on games. At that time the Paramount movie was expected to hit the theatres around January 2008.
The other developers were already deep into other projects so I was the only one relatively available putting the finishing touches on the game Nowhere, however I had just only finished my first game as a lead developer and that had taken me about 5 months with debugging. The added responsibility did not scare me and for some reason I really felt confident I could get the job done well and in time. Luckily for me I did!

This project succeeded because the two guys I worked with, brothers Simon and Etienne Perin really did a tremendous job as graphic artist and game designer respectively. The graphics are really top notch and are I believe by far the best feature of the game, and Etienne's work really made everything happen. His early game design documents were right on the money, and thanks to them I was able to schedule almost all the necessary coding tasks from the start of the project, we all put in a lot of extra hours early on and we were so conscious of the tight schedule that we actually ended the project a couple days early.

The game was also at times frustrating to make because a lot of the creative decisions were out of our hands, we often wanted to push the gameplay further and sometimes had to simplify some of our gameplay features. However with hindsight I see now that these decisions we good marketing decisions and that the game is well tailored for its target audience.
Spanner Spencer from Pocket Gamer wrote a review that best reflects the game :

Pocket Gamer.co.uk Score : 7/10, Bronze Award

Vivendi's Game commercial

Opening game of Vivendi's Game commercial: Hit Mobile Game Line-Up 2008 :

Gameplay Video :

Nowhere (Java Midp)

Nowhere is a J2ME Midp 2.0 Survival Horror Game developed by the French company DeValley Entertainment.

I was the lead programmer for the development of this project and also worked on some of the porting.

The really interesting feature about this project was its goal to create a very disturbing atmosphere, always trying to keep the player uneasy yet wanting to discover the rest of the game, just like the feelings that can be experienced when watching a classic horror movie.

I am especially proud of having worked on this game, but to present it a little more objectively, I will refer you to some of the reviews :

Pocket Gamer.co.uk Score : 7/10, Bronze Award
Midlet-Review Score : 9/10, Mobile Game Award
Mobile Game FAQs Score : 82/100, Silver Award
Project Next Score : 89/100, Next Approved Award

(Please e-mail me if you know of another English speaking review of this game - email address is on my Resume Page)

Furthermore, the game was nominated for two awards at the Festival du Jeu Vidéo 2007, best scenario and best mobile game.

If you are not yet convinced, you can view this Game Trailer, but if you are you can already buy this game!

Official Trailer

Landers (Java Midp)

Landers is J2ME Midp 2.0 Shoot Them Up game developed by the French company DeValley Entertainment is one of my favorite mobile games, sadly I only worked on this project to add a score crypting component, and program the php site to decrypt the score codes and rank the players of the game online.

The game features an amazing soundtrack for a cell phone game, fast paced action and addictive gameplay.

Pocket Gamer.co.uk Preview
Project Next Score : 90/100, Next Approved Award

Official Trailer :

Holy Wars (Java Midp)

Holy Wars is J2ME Midp 2.0 Beat them up game developed by the French company DeValley Entertainment is one of DeValley's most successful recent titles.

This project was already developed after I started working at DeValley, but I was later put in charge of managing the porting and resolving a lot of device specific bugs.

Reviews :

Pocket Gamer.co.uk Score:6/10
Midlet-Review Score

Game Trailer
Trailer 2

Crash of the Titans (Java Midp)

This J2ME Midp 2.0 Beat them up game developed by the French company DeValley Entertainment is the first collaboration project with Vivendi Universal Games Mobile.

Just like Holy Wars, this project was just about done when I first started working for DeValley. I was asked to contribute to this project during the last weeks of crunch time and put in a few all-nighters to finish the game on time. I worked mostly on HUD display and some dialogue engine debugging.

Reviews :

Pocket Gamer.co.uk Score:5/10
Midlet-Review Score
Mobile Game FAQs Score:85/100
IGN Score:6/10
Project-Next Score:78/100

Vivendi's Game commercial

Toc

TOC was my second year school project.

This joint-venture in between a group of 5 programmers from In' Tech INFO programming school and 4 graphic artists from LISAA an art school with a computer arts program was the first collaboration between these two schools. This was a pilot program that led to multiple collaborations since then to this day. This was only the second time that a 3D game project was attempted at my school and was a high risk high reward type of project.

My duties on this project were programming lead as well as person in charge of programming the engine. I was in charge of directing the work of the four other programmers for an easy integration into the engine.

Our technology choice was to use Ogre (a GNU license C++ graphics engine) and it's Newton based physics plug-in OgreNewt. Our programming tool was Visual Studio.

The graphics and the teaser videos were provided by the graphic artists from LISAA.

The game is third person 3D platform-enigma game in a Maya-like world populated by anthropomorphic lizards.

The demo of the first enigma has never been totally finished but the game is playable.

Although this school project did not reach all the ambitious goals it had set for itself, it led all the members of the team get a first hand experience in working with a large amount of people in remote locations, the importance of setting up an effective production chain for easy data integration and the effort but also the joy involved in making an ambitious video game.

To get some sort of idea, I have made available a few things related to this project :

The original presentation documentation (in French) in PowerPoint format
The Wiki documentation (in french)
The source code
The executable code

You can move with WASD like a classic fps, jump with the space bar and activate objects with E. This version also allows free cam debugger mode (F12). In debug mode, F3 will display object collisions and F5 will reveal sound detection spheres.
Also note that the sounds and music are borrowed from the Half-Life Mod Natural Selection - at that time one of my favorite games - as a last minute replacement for data that hadn't been produced.

Starball

Starball was a first year 5 month Java Project focusing on making a homemade ball physics engine.

This was my second computer project ever after having worked on a stock market simulation site it was also my first time working as a project lead and first ever game related project.

We mostly worked on 2D collisions and object management. We worked with eclipse and J2SE (mostly with Java2D).

Sadly a computer crash resulted in the loss of the source code, a screen saver based on the engine as well as the main demo. However this has since then taught me the importance of correctly backing sensitive information on remote machines and I have never encountered a data loss related problem.

I have however recovered a static demo applet as well as a different jar demo.

Applet demo
Jar demo
Manual

Fallout 3 Modification

I have have enjoyed this game so much lately that I have decided to check out Bethesda's G.E.C.K. creation tools and play around with them.

Homebrew DS Tetris

Third and probably last of my Tetris games, I have ported the Android (Java) version of the game to C using common Homebrew library 'libdns'. This allowed me to get familiar with the DS hardware and create a functionning game in under two weeks of casual home programming.

Link to project on google code : http://code.google.com/p/dstetris/

XNA Tetris

I have been checking out XNA since its public release. I read two books on XNA Programming and gone through many tutorials and video tutorials. I have started building a custom game engine but I am still waiting to see if there will be a good 3D physics engine that can be integrated in an XNA project.

I have also ported my Android Tetris to XNA Tetris.

Android Tetris

I have programmed a fully functional Tetris clone for Android. It is available as an open source project on Google code http://code.google.com/p/androidtetris/ .

Barbu Dent Bleu Soccer

Barbu Dent Bleu Soccer is mostly a joke project. I worked on it for a few weekends only and never considered it as a commercial game.

It's an homage to one of my Co-worker's early projects: Barbu Soccer, a very fun and very simple PC soccer game. The only online reference I could find about it is here :
http://walex.cigogne.org/index.php/2005/05/06/1643-barbu-soccer

I also wanted to explore MIDP 2.0 multiplayer Bluetooth capabilities and wanted to recreate the fun and crazy soccer game as a two handset game for quick and easy fun. The part of the name Dent Bleu is a literal and ridiculous translation into French of "Blue Tooth".

Sadly I ran into trouble testing my Bluetooth engine mostly because I only have my Sony Ericsson Z710i to test with. I might resume work on this project if I get my hands on a second device.

The game also features a Single Player mode, however since I really meant this game to be multiplayer I have put no effort into making a good AI, but I might consider trying to improve it at some point in time.

The beta of the game is available for download, as well as the source(NetBeans Project). Be warned, the multiplayer mode is not working yet! Have fun anyway :D!

And finally, this game only weighs 64k!

Torque Project

I have just purchased the Torque Game engine Licence and am starting to go through some tutorials.

Java

The Java code I was the most serious about belongs to DeValley Entertainment and is used in cell phone games such as Nowhere or The Spiderwick Chronicles. However my Tetris for Android is totally open source and available on google code http://code.google.com/p/androidtetris/

C/C++

I have worked as Project Manager/Lead Programmer on a 6 month 3D C++ Ogre/Newton project. Here is the source code for it : source code I am also now involved with homebrew DS programming. I have ported my Android Tetris game to Nintendo DS using libdns the source can be found here.

This is code written for personal use and thus not always commented or structured the way I work in a professional environment, I could provide with the permission of my current company, case by case code samples if helpful.

I have experience some of my C# knowledge using ASP.NET (this site for example http://code.google.com/p/cferrario-open-portfolio/source/checkout ) and enjoy C# code. I also have some XNA experience having ported my custom Tetris game onto the XNA engine : http://code.google.com/p/xnatetris/source/checkout

Download Resume in Word format

Christian Ferrario

Christian Ferrario 26 Valeria Circle, North Salem, NY 10560 USA 51 rue Mirabeau, Ivry-Sur-Seine, 94200, France chris_ferrario@hotmail.com
Summary
	More than 2 years programming video games. 5 shipped 2D mobile games and one 3D Nintendo DS game.
Computer skills
	Languages � Proficient in: C/C++, C#, Java � Familiar with: ASP.NET/AJAX, PhP, JavaScript, Batch programming Software � IDE: Visual Studio, Eclipse, Netbeans, SourceSafe, Tortoise SVN... � Platforms: J2ME, Nitro( Nintendo DS ), OGRE, XNA, Android
Experience
		Main Programmer		01/2009-Present
		VG Creator, Montreuil, France � Responsible for the programming of a large scale 3D Nintendo DS video game. � Designed and developed a generic high level 3D Nintendo DS game engine designed for reuse. � Took on the responsibilities of project lead during the last phases of the project.
		Programmer Analyst / Assistant Game designer	07/2008-10/2008
		Gameloft, New York City, NY, USA � Assisted the main programmer in feature implementation and debugging. � Assisted the main game designer in game and level design, programmed new scripting functions. � Did R&D on the Android Platform as well as Midp 2.0 accelerometer features.
		Gameplay Programmer / Main Programmer	02/2007-03/2008
		DeValley Entertainment, Paris, France � Main programmer on two mid scale Java 2D mobile games. � Secondary programmer on three other Java 2D mobile games. � Reusable and highly portable engine programming, heavy optimization with very strict limitations.
Education
		In'Tech Info ( ESIEA GROUP )	2004�2007
		Paris, France � B.S. Equivalent, Computer Science ( French BAC+3 ) � Project oriented learning private school specializing in Software Engineering careers.

Summary

Computer skills

Experience

Education