Hyperware was a company my brother worked for at the time, and he pulled me aboard due to a deal they had brewing with McDonalds to create digital signage for the food menus which at the time didn't really exist.  

I worked remotely from South Carolina for this company in California, which was pretty unusual for 2001.  I had to create a platform that allowed setting up, updating and managing prices and other information via the internet through a website.  I learned a lot of JavaScript and DHTML figuring it all out.  

Unfortunately, the fall out from 9/11 along with the Dot-com bubble bursting resulted in a recession, and investors pulled out, and the project died along with the company in 2002.  On a Friday afternoon, a conference call made it official when executives gathered everyone together and announced, "It's over."

Since I have no pictures for this really, pictured to the left is "Ultracade", a product my brother was heavily involved with at Hyperware, which was an awesome classic multi-cade.  I never worked on Ultracade directly.

Rate your writing was the first full-scale website I created for people to share their writing and get it rated by others.  It became popular for the time in the age of the early web.  Thousands of pieces of writing were posted, as well as many weekly columns and daily news.  It also had very active forums and one community member even sent out a quarterly newsletter with the most liked pieces via actual mail!  I created the site from scratch using what I learned about PHP4 and MySQL at Netcasters.  PHP4 had just come out in May, 2000, and it was ALL the rage!  

Ultracade Technologies was sold to GlobalVR in 2006 (more or less), so although my employer changed, we just kept rolling on the things we were working on at the time at our remote office.

After hearing about this game engine for a bit, I finally checked it out in late 2013.  I was immediately blown away by it's power and potential, and started learning as much as I could as fast as I could.

Domino Express holds historical significance because it was the first game I ever made in Unity.  It released just after the New Year on the iOS app store.  It was pretty crudely made, and I barely knew what I was doing, still trying to digest the new world that Unity had exposed me to.

Once I had the pipeline set up, we quickly iterated on the concept of "Express" and released four more titles in January.  The mechanic was a combination of touching the screen to move the board forward while creating solitaire runs, poker hands, etc..  We even made a Superbowl Express in time for the Superbowl that year, but Apple rejected it.

Also worth noting, I created Keno Creator Pro which I ended up taking down off the asset store a few years later since I didn't think it was up to snuff and I didn't have the time to maintain it.  Several people have contacted me over the years to get a copy and I've sold it via other means as a result.

I was made aware of an opportunity at Grover Gaming in May of 2015.  At the time, there were around 30 employees.  After checking them out, I immediately identified the company as a very scrappy bunch, much like myself, so I saw the potential of what it could be.  As a result, my wife and I packed up, sold our house and left Massachusetts to move to Greenville, North Carolina on a total leap of faith.  I started as a Game Developer, and it has been quite a journey with Grover ever since, which has grown more than 10-fold since then.  To say I have learned and grown a tremendous amount since then would be a gross understatement.  There is no way this page will ever include even a fraction of the projects and things I've worked on at Grover, for a variety of reasons, from not significant enough to the nature of R&D requiring a lot of things we work on to stay under wraps.

This was the very first project at Grover I got thrust on to.  I'm not going to explain what it is, but from a technical standpoint, it consisted of creating Unity webGL builds of some of Grover games, changing the communication layer to Websockets and creating an android app to go along with it.  It was ultimately an idea that did not get traction and eventually died out.

If you want to know what it was: Click here 

Pioneered the creation of an HTML5 Slot engine and the first game to be used with a product in bingo halls in Canada.  

We had to travel to Canada several times between CBN and AGCO during this process, which was pretty fun.  

Five more games were created on the system after it was deployed.  This product is still running today.

French translations were not fun, however. 

Created all regulatory game-side components and ported twelve games.  Also did all game communication and integration with 3rd party backend system.  We rolled this project out to several locations and in total we had somewhere north of 100 devices in the field for about three years.  Also, about this time is when I took the job as Director of Research and Development.

Another new  market for Grover, I worked with the engineering team to create this new product, with South Dakota as the target.  It consisted of the usual, porting games, data access layer changes and additions, regulatory components and more.  This market is still running today with plans to expand into additional states.

This was an early 2020 project which consisted of creating a new backend and game architecture for future development.  I did all game architecture development for our first target market which happened to be Pulltabs.  That included 10 games, a new data access layer and more.  Unfortunately, the system was never completed on the engineering side (backend) and was subsequently abandon and later rebooted.

The first target product built on this new system was Grover's second rendition of Historical Horse Racing.  Essentially what that means is, the game determination (aka what you will win) is based on the outcomes of horse races that occurred in the past.

With my Team, we created an entirely new development kit for use by game developers to have a minimalist, streamlined, multi market/product framework which will ease the development process in the future and allow developers to focus solely on making great games.  Stock photo to the right.