If you’re looking for Unity work – especially ports of indie games, contact me at alex@alexrosegames.com. I charge per day, so my ports work out significantly cheaper than large porting houses, but with impeccable quality. If you want optimisation, I will also make sure your game runs at 60fps throughout.
I check every console requirement by hand. Most companies use first submission as a bug report and then start fixing, instead of making the port fully compliant in advance. I prefer to pass certification first time so you don’t have to stress about your release date – almost all of my ports have passed cert first time, and I have never come close to missing a release date. Here are examples of my work:
Porting Showcase
Recompile
Ported to Xbox Series X + S, PlayStation 5, Gamecore for Windows and Physical PS5 Edition
Super Rude Bear Resurrection
This is my own award winning game, you can read about it here. I ported and release managed it for PS4 and Steam.
Cluedo
Ported to Xbox Series S/X and Xbox One, and PS4 (with PS5 forward compatibility), including release management
Passing By
Ported to Nintendo Switch and optimised
Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator
Ported to Xbox Series X + S, Xbox One & Gamecore for Windows
Monster Prom XXL
Update patch and physical release creation for the Nintendo Switch physical release of Monster Prom XXL
Game of Life 2 – El Dorado World
Content update and DLC for Xbox One, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 4, and guided the release management
Top Secret
Currently porting three NDA titles to Xbox Series X, Playstation 4 and Xbox One
Localisation Showcase
Recompile
Converted a highly complex proprietry multi-layered quad based UI system (PhiOS), to support CJK, Russian and Extended Latin. Required ancient ASCII Code Page 437 atlases. Dozens of bespoke atlases were hotswapped in real time performantly. Each latin language required different permutations of the base sheet due to limited space for accent characters
Skyrise City
A psychological assessment Unity app which I localised to Arabic and CJK. The UI was scientifically validated in its exact configuration – no text box could move a single pixel. I wrote a 1-click system to parse every scene and prefab in any Unity game, convert all TextMeshes to TextMeshPro in a visibly identical manner, and add RTL support.
Super Rude Bear Resurrection
I worked directly with freelance localisers, set up a pipeline to automate from Google Sheets straight into the game, supported CJK and Russian cyrillic through TMPro atlases. Wrote automatic achievement parsers to output metadata for consoles. Managed all store metadata for all SIEE and SIEA mandatory languages.
Physics Showcase
Yami
Rewrote the character controller to support 6-axis 3D relative motion inheriting the motion of any series of objects stacked on top of one another, including rope physics, root motion climb animation sequences round bespoke geometry etc.
Recompile
Modified the character controller to support conditional relative motion, rotational relative motion, coriolis force adjustments, and various improvements like slope detection
Technikum-Wien
I wrote the Physik Und Simulation syllabus for the University of Applied Science Vienna and lectured a 28 lecture course on the application of physics in game development over zoom during lockdown. You can see examples of my bespoke physics throughout almost all of my jam games and my PS4 game, as I hold a BSc in Physics (University of Manchester). I have 28 lectures in my Talk page.
Optimisation Showcase
Recompile
Recompile required huge optimisation, several weeks before release, the 4k version was still unviable on home consoles, running at less than 15FPS. I was able to rewrite lots of code to keep the CPU above 80fps constantly, and wrote a dynamic resolution scaling algorithm that targeted only the non-UI HDRP render pass to keep the GPU running at 60FPS constantly. When you are being attacked by dozens of enemies at once, the game will not drop frames, but will dynamically scale to quarter resolution, unnoticeably as there is so much action occurring.
Rotation Station
My ancient first mobile release. 100% of the code, music, sfx, 3d models, art assets, particles etc. were created by me. This game was created in Unity 3.2 – before 2D support was added. The engine didn’t even support sprites, so I had to write my own GL based sprite solution, because iPhone 3GS was the minimum target requirement at the time. This device only had 256MB of RAM. The Unity engine itself used 3/4 of that, so everything had to be optimised down to the finest level. My hardest ever optimisation job for my first ever shipped title in University.
Jetpack Journeys: Discovery
My second ever contract in 2014. The game needed to be certified by the end of the week to coincide with a museum exhibit. Unfortunately, neither I nor the studio owned a premium Unity license key, and at the time, asynchronous scene loading was a premium unity feature! So I rolled my own bespoke scene loader. Unlike official async scene loading, it reads frame timings to maintain an acceptable frame rate at all times. For this reason, I ended up reusing the same concept 8 years later to make Yami’s scene transitions smoother.
Tool Showcase
Prefab Spawner
Editor tool for automatically generating scenery across any kind of surface normal (for things like trees, crystals, mushrooms, vegetation, anything really)
Pipe Creator
In Recompile it was taking the level designers too long to generate huge complex pipe puzzles and hook them up, so I wrote this editor tool that allows you to simply make pipes by drawing and spinning with WASD/QE and arrows for rotation
Frame Data Editor
Unity doesn’t have a good built-in solution for games based on Frame Data like action games, fighting games etc. so I wrote this tool that lets you create your own sprite based animations based on frame data, assign each ones states (startup, active, cooldown etc.) and assign hitboxes and hurtboxes
Design Showcase
Super Rude Bear Resurrection
From its inception in the Ludum Dare jam, Rude Bear won the innovation award out of thousands of entries. Since then it was nominated Best Indie of Tokyo Game Show, Best Single Player Game of PAX East, won Gamespot’s GOTY Editor’s Choice 2017, and received rave reviews from Gamespot, Destructoid, The Guardian, Waypoint etc – with 9/10 and 9.5/10 ratings from many outlets praising its design
Jam Games
Multiple of my jam games have won first place awards in the world’s biggest game jam, Ludum Dare, and I won the EGX Rezzed Game Jam. I have made dozens of award winning game prototypes, too many to list here. I have an entire page here dedicated to my dozens of free publicly released games which you can play yourself
Illarion
I was a developer, mapmaker and GM on a German/English MORPG called Illarion. Under the pseudonym Flux I wrote the fighting system, the crafting system, the experience system, the unique/legendary drops system, and created many maps, unique quests and NPCs to please our playerbase from 2008-2013
Proficiencies
Engines and Languages
I have been using Unity since 2011 and Unreal since 2019. I am fluent in C#, C++, Lua, Javascript, MATLAB script, HTML/CSS (I made this site myself), PHP, SQL, Python, Git and Regex. I know Photon, Epic Online Services, and the various console APIs. I also speak English (C2), Russian (B1/B2), Japanese (A2), Mandarin (A1) and French (A1).
Programs
I am fluent in all the tools of the trade. SVN, Plastic, I run my own Git/Perforce servers. FMOD and Wwise. I am fluent in Photoshop, Illustrator, Inkscape, Premiere Pro, Resolve, After Effects, OBS, FL Studio, Ableton, Blender and MATLAB. I can synthesise SFX, edit, mix and master Foley and music, cut and edit trailers and snappy videos, create UIs, LUTs, edit and fix assets and create metadata
People Skills
I’ve had the joy of working alongside professional gamedevs since age 15. I’ve worked in teams from small to large, from offices to online and run my own studio. I’ve successfully pitched funding from Sony, Creative England, UKGF, and made professional relationships all over the industry from indies to the presidents of Sony and Xbox. I’ve given talks across the world, hosted panels, hosted my stream on the front page of Twitch, and costreamed on the couch at official Twitch events. I’ve streamed gamedev since 2013, and lectured up and down the country
Interviews
Digital Foundry
Digital Foundry did a profile on Recompile including interviews with me throughout about Recompile, tooldev, porting, my background and the (then) new and unreleased generation of consoles
Anthony Carboni (Bytejacker)
Impromptu interview about Super Rude Bear Resurrection at GDC 2017 (I had the GDC plague at the time)
Source Gaming
Hour long interview after the release of Super Rude Bear Resurrection about the industry, plans, future