The games developer within me was beckoning, so I jumped at the chance to join Peek & Poke. As Senior Developer, I customise a catalogue of mini-games to reflect the brand identity of some very well-known brands! My role has me jumping between game design, front end game development, back end logic, as well as revising dev-ops processes, managing web infrastructure, and optimising pipelines. It's a lot of fun!
Started as a back-end web developer spinning up portfolio and e-commerce sites built around a custom CMS to promote and sell the services of local companies. Here is where I honed my full stack web development skills, learning from some brilliant minds. I quickly became a core member of the team, taking on more responsibility, and eventually earned the title of Senior Web Developer. When I wasn't writing code, I was managing servers and handling dev-ops.
Jumped straight into the mobile gaming arena, building bespoke online multiplayer experiences. I also teamed up with some brilliant people to craft an e-learning world complete with voice-recognition technology that taught the English language.
I impressed the team so much I was invited straight back after uni to continue building awesome digital toys and games for household name clients like BBC, Channel 4, Sky, Nickelodeon, and [adult swim]. During this stint I built a game that was recreated on the ISS by real astronauts, and worked with scientists to build a game that crowd sourced research data to help save the Ash tree from a deadly virus. We were the cool kids on the block and when Flash started showing its age, we were busy pioneering the new world of HTML5 browser games before it was mainstream!
My very first gig. I spent my placement year building quirky Flash games and apps in a fast moving agency environment. My absolute highlights include: A chaotic music game with BBC's Hacker and Dodge, an interactive tracking app for yacht racing, and a maze game for a medical tradeshow that you had to play by balancing on a Wii-Fit board!
The training phase! Here I learned the ancient arts of game design, dev, and gaming hardware. The team I led scored a legendary 100% building a 3D game that the professors used to show off to future students for years. For my final year project, I built a technical demo using a Kinect sensor to track player movement.
A collection of my most memorable projects. I can't show everything I've worked on due to NDAs and the sheer number of them, but here are some of my favourites.
I'd been using various tools like Workflowy and Keep to make notes but wanted something a bit more attuned to how I work. In the age of AI vibe coding, I thought I'd give AntiGravity a whirl and this is what I came up with. I'm pretty pleased with the result and I've been using it to manage my brain dumps ever since. It supports Markdown-formatted text cards, task lists and image embedding with annotation on an infinitely scrollable canvas. I'm regularly adding new features as I need them.
A fun take on Peek & Poke's Conga engine, put together for DFDS to celebrate a special anniversary. Players control a conga line of people, moving through all areas of the ship, collecting people along the way, avoiding obstacles and trying to get the longest conga line possible. This one had additional outdoor areas with water effects, shops, restaurants and even a car deck. It was a visually stunning game and I'm really pleased with the end result.
A fast-paced, horse themed take on our racing game where players race against time to complete laps, collect points and avoid obstacles. It also had the incentive of being able to win prizes in the form of free drinks at the bar. This one was a lot of fun to make!
One of the most rewarding websites I put together at Evoluted that serves two separate holiday parks. Aside from looking great and being easy to navigate, it includes integration with a third party booking system including real-time availability checks, dynamic pricing and also houses a 360° tour of the park.
A space catapult game for Channel 4's Live From Space. Players use a catapult to launch balls and try to get them through spinning hoops in zero gravity. The game was a huge success and was played by thousands of people across the UK and recreated on board the ISS (though they had to use a drill to spin the hoops to prevent them spinning away!)
Team Cooper teamed up with the Sainsbury Laboratory to create a game that would help them fight the deadly Ash Dieback disease. Since humans used to be a lot better at pattern recognition, we created a game that helped visualise genetic data and incentivised matching sequences in the most optimal way to "claim" a pattern. This made a great social game for a good cause.
A selection of carnival-style minigames featuring the popular UK comedy duo Dick 'n' Dom. The team had a lot of fun designing and building the various minigames including voiceovers from the duo themselves.
An intense zombie runner-shooter made as a spare time project. Run, shoot, and survive. Unfortunately this game is no longer available on the Play store as the tools used to build it have been discontinued and it fell out of support for the latest Android versions.