NAME: Richard Arnold
ADDRESS: Hetzgasse 16/30,1030,Vienna
TEL: +43 (0) 699 11097929
EMAIL: richard@okidoki-apps.com
WEBSITE: www.okidoki-apps.com
ARCHIVE: www.okidoki-apps.com/curriculumvitae
NATIONALITY: Australian
DATE OF BIRTH: 23.04.1970
GENDER: Male
UNITY DEVELOPER/ 3D ANIMATOR (MAYA)
WORK HISTORY:
2011-Present
Unity Developer
Indie game/app development.
Self employed, operating originally as ImpossibleVisions, and later rebranding as Okidoki-apps.
Total responsibility for all aspects of app development and deployment.
Including:
- Game/concept design
- Level design
- C# programming
- 3D modelling/animation
- Publishing to multiple platforms
- Monetisation
- Debugging
2008-2011
3D Computer animator (Maya)
1995-2008
Artist – (sculpture)
EDUCATION & TRAINING: 1992-2001
1999-2001
Post-Graduate Diploma in Digital Art (3D Computer Animation)
University of Adelaide
1992-1995
Graduate Diploma in Visual and Applied Arts (Sculpture)
North Adelaide School of Art
SKILLS AND COMPETENCES:
LANGUAGE SPOKEN: English
OTHER LANGUAGES: German ( conversational )
SOCIAL SKILLS:
Good communicator
Artistic sensibility, inventive thinking
ORGANISATIONAL SKILLS:
Experienced at self organising.
Attention to detail.
Patient and persistent debugger.
COMPUTER SKILLS:
Unity (10+ years)
Maya ( 3D animation) (10+years)
Video/Audio editing and production
Photoshop
AfterEffects
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
I have been developing games and apps with Unity independently since 2011.
Initially, I began making apps for children, then moved on to more challenging games and puzzles, and have recently been branching out into apps for video manipulation and also health-tech.
Being a self taught C# programmer ( I never studied computer science ), however I have been coding on a daily basis for the last ten years with both C# and Unityscript.
I have a comprehensive understanding of Unity, as I have had to understand almost every aspect of it in order to successfully create a diverse range of functioning apps. I also have experience with a diverse range of computer graphics software programs, including Maya, Final Cut Pro, and audio production tools.
My progression of digital skills can be divided into the following stages:
- Unity development 2011-2022
- 3D Animation 2008-2011
- Art (sculpture) 1995-2008
Overall, I have had more than 8 million downloads of all of my apps (plus about 20 million pirated copies).
I have deployed apps to multiple platforms including Apple App Store and Mac store and Apple TV. GooglePlay, Amazon Appstore, Windows 8 mobile, Facebook games, NOOK, Opera, HTML5 web players.
I have successfully integrated In-App-Purchasing, innumerable 3rd party plugins, and deployed my most successful apps localised with up to 35 different language translations.
I have used Vuforia, ARkit and also integrated Augmented Reality with a map/navigational system, and more recently the Barracuda Neural Networking system.
I have also experimented with the Photon Network Engine, and Mirror, to make a multiplayer version of one of my games.
Last year, RedBull Mind Gamers contacted me with a request to use one of my games SNORK ( now SuperCubic ) for one of their challenges.
UNITY SKILLS
XR/VR
I have recently been converting my game SuperTrains to a version for deployment on the Oculus Quest store. It has been an interesting advance in skills, especially the change in UI layouts and camera positioning, and is almost complete.
NEURAL NETWORK
I have also recently deployed the Unity Barracuda A.I. neural network system to my Surrealizer videoFX app for standalone build. It uses trained image recognition to separate human figures in foreground from background.
CHARACTER DESIGN/ANIMATION
I have done animation with both the MechAnim system and also bringing in Legacy animation from Maya.
I have also imported designed characters into an automatic rigging system in Adobe Mixamo and then applied character animations to them for blending within Unity.
In the new version of Dinosaurus that I’m currently developing, each dinosaur has about twelve animations controlled by an Animator 2D Freeform cartesian blendtree, plus a range of attack and response animations.
ENVIRONMENT DESIGN
Have made many terrains using an array of shaders including the use of toon shaders. Have made flowing rivers, spline based roads, forests etc.
Using unity terrain for my EarthMovers project I was also able to implement a system for excavating earth…that is, to make holes in the terrain in real time.
LIGHTING
I have worked out a good workflow for baking lightmaps.
For mobile deployment, I have optimised lighting systems often simulating shadows for better performance, sometimes using shadow blob projectors instead of realtime shadows for performance.
SHADERGRAPH
My app Surrealizer uses quite a few customised shaders, that I developed in ShaderGraph, providing realtime input variance. Normally this consists of inputting movies into texture channels and modifying uv or some other input in realtime.
NAVMESH
SuperTrains in its most recent iteration uses a NavMesh system for tank and enemy soldier deployment. SuperCubic uses an entirely original A* pathfinding system.
MONETISATION
Though I began originally by using the free/paid model ( free trial games with links to complete paid version) I have more recently converted most of my apps to IAP systems on free games. SuperTrains has a system where the player collects gold coins to access abilities/levels/equipment but it is faster to purchase gold coins in bulk via IAP.
I can also implement IAP on Mac standalone builds in the MacAppStore which has proven to be quite difficult in the past.
SERVER NETWORKING
My app “Carely” involved tracking elderly clients and regularly uploading details of their GPS position to an encrypted google sheets file. The phones of the carers would regularly ping these servers to monitor their position, and to alarm the users if the elderly person left the designated area, also automatically informing other carers via notifications.
XCODE
I know XCODE pretty well, having used it regularly since 2010 at least. I have published games to TvOS, MacOS ( including with IAP which was difficult to accomplish between 2017 and 2021) and of course IOS.
SHURIKEN PARTICLES
I know Shuriken pretty well. Generally, I purchase pre exiting particle assets and modify them to suit.
MOBILE OPTIMISATION.
I’ve managed to squeeze performance out of my games by obsessively hunting down performance improvement possibilities. These include rewriting code to be more efficient, reducing polygon use, and faking light/shadow.
LOCALIZATION
My games are also available in over 30 languages. This also includes country specific images in the app stores
MAYA SKILLS
I originally started learning computer animation with Alias Wavefront explore, the precursor to Maya.
I regularly use Maya to create assets for Unity.
As seen in my short video “DIGGER” I was able to model an ancient steam shovel with polygonal modelling. This involved using the Maya MASH system to make animated tank tracks, and nCloth to make stretchy steel cables. This required a fair bit of caching. Also used the MASH system for natural tree distribution on a terrain.
The animation of the human characters utilised both animation blending and regular skeletal/facial animation.
EARLIER LIFE
As an artist, I was represented by Greenaway Gallery, one of the top private galleries in Australia.
My sculpture is present in several Australian private collections and has also been purchased by Artbank, a Commonwealth government art leasing program for contemporary art in Australia.