Jean-Eric Khalife Email & Phone Number

Culver City, Ca, Us

Derry / Worldwide, Gb

- Scaled product ownership across six teams, driving initiative prioritization and clear direction, which led to the successful delivery of critical milestones and significantly boosted project momentum and discipline stakeholder confidence.- Established clear goals and an outcome-based roadmap for discipline pipeline readiness, prioritizing high-value work and focusing team efforts, which streamlined production processes and enhanced cross-disciplinary collaboration and output quality.- Implemented a work system involving technical representatives from all creative disciplines, fostering direct feedback loops with engineers, ensuring the development of technology that precisely met discipline-specific and overarching game development needs.- Mentored multiple producers throughout the organization, enhancing their effectiveness as product leaders and contributing to the successful delivery of key outcomes across multiple teams, fostering a culture of excellence and continuous improvement.- Coached and guided multiple teams about different discipline pipeline approaches in game development. Worked with discipline stakeholders and engineers to blend the best AAA development practices with the unique needs for a voxel based and collaboratively edited UGC game like Hytale. This included creating prototypes in engines like Unreal and Godot and assets in DCC tooling like Maya and Blender to demo AAA workflows.

Derry / Worldwide, Gb

-Analyzed existing tooling and ecosystems, creating a prioritized plan and backlog that addressed key tooling improvements, which led to a pivot of priorities away from Art tooling and towards Design tooling to address the game creation design bottleneck that was occurring. -Aligned stakeholders on UGC tooling vision through comprehensive market analysis, determining the optimal editor features for Hytale, which led to a unified and actionable strategy for user-generated content integration.-Led the evaluation of new game engines, conducting empirical analysis of both off-the-shelf and proprietary engines with a team of experts, resulting in the selection and adoption of a custom engine that significantly outperformed existing solutions in flexibility and performance.-Collaborated with vendors to develop a custom engine for Hytale, which was prototyped and deployed to internal teams in under 2 years, establishing a scalable, proprietary engine foundation supporting 14 creative disciplines pre-production.- Pioneered the development of a foundational asset system and in-engine tooling, adopted universally by engineering teams, which negated the need for custom code and facilitated rapid iteration and simplified asset management across the project.

North Hollywood, California, Us

- Instructor of Game Creation 3 where I help the next generation of game developers learn the ins and outs of the character pipeline in Unreal Engine. They learn to use Epic's Animation and Rigging Toolset along with core UE4 animation features like state machines, anim dynamics, retargeting, and anim montages.

San Mateo, Ca, Us

- Reviewed existing tooling opportunities and feature needs in end-to-end pipeline and worked with company leadership to approve a plan, backlog, and roadmap for addressing key improvements for 2020, of which, over 90% were completed on schedule. - Rewrote full Maya export pipeline including meshes, animations, and rig exporters with modern UIs, a scalable infrastructure, and easy to expand on codebase which resulted in happier and faster artists, reduced errors, and easier feature development.- Lead R&D on a large scale UI refactor to include 3D elements that bring a dynamic and AAA feel to our UI. The effort was presented to the company with extreme praise and company-wide excitement to implement the 3D UI in the game. - Created tools focused on improving artist efficiency including a tool to improve material creation and management, a tool to auto-convert assets, and a tool to easily create and run batch scripts across multiple files. - Grew and expanded Technical Art team by identifying needs and hiring world class talent to improve our tools and support industry standard 3rd party tools which allowed us to expand our outsourcing capabilities and ultimately reduce outsourcing costs by 50%. - Invested in company success and culture by leading company offsites on topics like remote working improvements and creating a shared feedback culture. - Advised on CEO staff meetings and worked through challenges with senior leadership to ensure we successfully achieved company goals.

- Founded RoboWorld Entertainment with a focus on bringing developers and players together to build great games they love. - Pitched to investors and publishers and secured accelerator funding to build a prototype of Space Racing Legends, a GaaS team-based competitive racing game. - Developed and released VizRef, a top 10 selling iPad reference board app.

Los Angeles, Ca, Us

RiotEditor/Riot Game Data Server: “The Unreal for League of Legends” (June 2015 - June 2018):-Owned and drove the creation of a front-end and back-end platform that allowed users to efficiently create, store, and manage content in a continuous development environment on League of Legends-Developed a strategy to transition League of Legends while live developing the platform, currently saving over $2.5m per year with a final projected savings of over $40m - $60m over the next 5 years-Led development of a vfx tool in RiotEditor called “ParticleTown” utilizing a customer focused feedback loop improving the NPS (Net Promoter Score) from -40 to 87 in only 5 months, resulting in twice the amount of high quality skins, increasing revenue by over 30%, and eliminating voluntary regrettable attrition since its release-Analyzed and monitored key metrics in the RiotEditor platform to prioritize feedback to drive strategic goals and key targets-Sourced, managed, and recruited top talent on a cross-collaborative team providing career growth, mentorship and coaching that drove target metrics -Secured stakeholder backing to develop a transition for League of Legends to a modern rendering engine and state of the art artist tools-Led engineering and technical art team in a successful transition to new rendering engine using a strategy that resulted in negligible player impact. The scope of the transition can be compared to swapping out the engine of an airplane mid-flight without any of the passengers noticing-Led department-wide change management effort to move Artists away from inefficient hand-painted textures to new efficient Material technology; gained full adoption

Los Angeles, Ca, Us

Update to Summoner's Rift:-Improved Maps development pipeline in order to streamline artist workflows including creating an easy-to-use exporter and integrating automatic source control updates-Developed and fully owned an atlasing tool which optimized texel density while maintaining visual quality allowing the map to effectively run on the minimum PC requirements

San Mateo, California, Us

God of War: Ascension:-Developed Maya tools including rewriting the Recent Files Menu, utilizing batch functionality to update thousands of files at once, and creating Wonder Tech shaders used during God of War illusion scenes-Optimized performance and memory costs to hit fps requirements and run effectively on the PS3Polished In-Game Cinematics by cleaning up animations, adjusting gameplay elements, and hooking up vfx

Irvine, Ca, Us

-Prototyped new game ideas to pitch to publishers resulting in successful funding -Functioned as a generalist game developer providing what was needed to create high-quality games including memory and performance management, artist tool development, and creating art ranging from UI to dynamic environment art-Shipped 3 games including Dungeon Siege 3, NeverwinterNights: Mask of the Betrayer, and NeverwinterNights: Storm of Zehir

Irvine, Ca, Us

Flash UI Artist, 3D Environment Artist

Orange, Ca, Us

• Developed and designed original award-winning publications for Chapman University, including logos, calendars, posters, collateral, promotional items and t-shirts.• Consulted with clients regarding different graphic needs, handling all aspects of a job including filing and billing, gaining valuable experience about the printing and creative process.