Johnny Owens Email and Phone Number

I created and continue to maintain and expand GrackleHQ.com, an automated job site for the games industry. Taught myself ASP.NET, Razor Pages, database management through Entity Framework, and live ops in Azure and Jenkins to maintain and expand the site for thousands of monthly users

I am the technical owner of our custom narrative and cinematics pipelines and systems, handling building stand-alone tools in C#/Avalonia and C++/Unreal 5, as well as helping to direct an external team of engineers working on the initiative. This includes a custom writing tool for building branching, episodic stories, and a cinematic generator for automating creation of first-pass cinematics based on the script. I also designed and built tools, content pipelines, and runtime systems for multiple game features, including voice-over recording and state tracking, character barks, and paper doll-style character customization.

Served as the studio tools engineer for an internal project, working on tools, content workflows, gameplay, and communication processes for an unannounced Unreal 5 project. Built workflow improvements in Unreal 5 and Maya to support faster iteration of our unique NURBS-based level workflow Built gameplay features in Unreal for player customization and cinematic playback for a live-service game Worked with designers and artists to understand their existing workflows, design improvements, implement features, and document new workflows

I work with the content creation teams to discover, spec out, and implement workflow improvement for finishing work on The Callisto Protocol. That involved implementing new features and workflow improvements in the Unreal 4 engine/editor, making improvements to Unreal Game Sync, and creating systems for automated building and reporting for tracking the state of the game as we finalized it. I also managed a team of tools development vendors, writing their tasks, giving them feedback and iterating with them, and reviewing their code.

I was a member of Retro's Tools Engineering department, which is responsible for all of the internal software used by the development team. I worked mainly on C#/WPF tools, fixing bugs and adding functionality to existing tools, and taking the development lead on multiple brand new tools that have rolled out to users. I interfaced with the users of the tool to understand their workflow and needs, and to identify upcoming challenges and ways we can help those efforts with new tools features. I worked with other tools engineers to ensure knowledge sharing and build new features together, as well as worked with runtime engineers to design and implement new runtime features alongside the necessary tools support.I touched all areas of content creation, my largest areas of work were on our Audio, VFX, and Shader pipelines. I helped design and implement a new audio development tool, lowering iteration time, improving runtime data visibility for improved mixing workflows, and editing large data sets while keeping the tool responsive. On VFX, I worked with a new team of artists to help them learn the workflow, then leverage their past experiences to design and implement improvements to our in-house system. I made changes to the VFX system to better integrate it into our scripting and make VFX instances more customizable and easier to iterate on. And for the Shader workflow, I led the effort in transitioning the team from a programmer-driven shader workflow to a graph-based, artist driven workflow. That involved working with artists to understand their needs and graphics engineers to understand the existing workflow, researching modern shader workflows, and leading the design and development of our new Shader Graph Editor. While contributing to the code, I also managed other tools engineers work on it, writing task, doing code reviews, maintaining consistency, and relying on their individual experience and expertise to quickly spin up a great workflow for shader artists.

In my Build Engineer duties, I run the development of our Jenkins-based automated build and test processes for two projects. I took our bare bones build system, configured it to better interact with our source control, rewrote most of our build scripts to run cleaner and report better, and managed our hardware to keep up with the increased build load. I also wrote a system for us to run automated tests on both our tools and game on checkin, handling both the testing and the reporting. As the studio Tools Engineer, I field tools requests from two different projects. We're working in a provided engine, so I work to expand the functionality of the current toolset, fix tool crashes, and add new project-specific tools. All of our tools work in this engine is C++ based in a custom UI framework. I'm responsible for managing my requests, prioritizing them, interfacing with the end user to gather requirements, and documenting them both in code and on wiki after they've been implemented.

I was hired as an Audio Scripter, mainly to be scripting support for the audio team (debugging issues for them, setting up hooks for their sound playback, rewriting a few of our audio script systems). After a few months there, I also branched out into Tools Programming, bringing our dialogue tool to stable and feature complete in addition to my main duties. I worked heavily on our C# WPF dialog tool, wrote tools to manage, implement, and profile our localized audio, and helped to write a few utility tools for the audio team to make their lives easier.

I was an audio programmer on the Core Technology Group at Volition. I worked on integrating WWise feature control into an internal engine, as well as creating tools to improve the workflow of the audio team. Before that I did mission scripting for Saints Row IV as well as the Enter the Dominatrix and How The Saints Saved Christmas DLC packs. I worked very closely with designers, artists, and audio on each mission in a collaborative, iterative development process.

I wrote tools for the Platform teams at BioWare Austin, the studio behind Star Wars: The Old Republic. I wrote automation testing system and scripting APIs to give testers a simple, easy-to-use system for writing platform test cases, runing regressions, and outputing reports.

I was a programmer on the team developing the GameSalad native (Mac, iOS) engine and the GameSalad Creator tool. I worked in C++, Objective-C, and Lua, the latter two being new languages to me that I learned on the job. I worked to fix bugs in the engine and the creator, as well as implement new features in the engine/creator. These features would touch a number of different systems, including physics and data management.

I worked for a bit over three months as a gameplay programming intern on an Saints Row: The Third for the XBox 360 and PS3. I worked mostly in C++, updating old gameplay code and writing new code for the game. I also dealt with debugging practices on the XBox 360.