Featured Work

Educational Software

By far the most common projects I handled at Primal Screen were educational games and apps, for clients including PBS Kids, Sesame Street, and Curriculum Associates. I went from being the sole developer in early years, to setting up the game framework used for all of Primal's educational games, to leading the development department and directing junior developers and interns on later projects.

While simple mechanically, these games required deep understanding of low-end device performance characteristics, and accessibility requirements for young children who may lack fine motor skills and reading comprehension. And at the end of the day, everything had to achieve the goal of teaching concepts from science and math to social emotional learning.

Performance

Performance was critical to get right for these games. The target audience being children, and often those in poor and underserved communities, meant that the devices these would typically be played on were old hand-me-downs and those available in public schools and libraries. In order to be accessible and useful, everything had to run smoothly on devices that most other companies would write off as no longer relevant. I take great pride in the number of games and apps that reliably ran at 60fps on an iPad 2.

I developed Redline early on, a performance optimization tool for CreateJS games. Comes from an understanding of createjs performance characteristics with cached and uncached vector assets, on low end target devices (iPad 2). Allowed producers to pinpoint exact areas of low framerate, and drill down to the specific scene assets that were causing problems, which then allowed artists to spot fix any performance problems. This massivley reduced performance related bug reports, and meant that perf targets could be hit reliably without involving Primal's engineering team.

Training Grounds

After establishing the game engine foundation, these projects became a reliable starting ground for interns and junior devs. We routinely had developer interns for a few months, and by laying a consistent foundation for the development of these games, I was able to direct them on actual client work, giving them valuable experience, and allowing our team to punch above its weight by ramping up new and temporary hires to be productive with little oversight on short timelines. THis is the part fo working on these projects that I thrived on, laying out the plan for execution, and fostering the skills and experience of new hires.

Early Learning Games

Among many games for PBS Kids, I developed the Play and Learn Science app, which won the ALSC Excellence in Early Learning Digital Media Award. This app was build in Unity, and a follow up app focused on Engineering was subsequently developed as individual web-based modules bundled into a larger native app. I directed the team who developed the second app, having been responsible for hiring, managing, and mentoring all of them, and they built a wonderful product with minimal oversight.

We also developed over 20 games for Sesame Street, both on their primary games page, and for specific community support pages specifically for children with autism, in military families, or whose parents have substance abuse issues. These were both fun games and useful educational tools, for kids, parents, and educators alike.

Curriculum Associates

Included in this mix is a considerable amount of work for the Curriculum Associates i-Ready product. Primal Screen was hired to do design and animation work for grades K-3. This also involved building custom unique interactive modules to integrate with the overall system.

I also developed a set of interactive templates, so artists could produce dozens of modules using a set of common interaction frameworks. These produced self contained bundles to be consumed by CA's APIs. Performance optimization tools like Redline helped ensure size targets were hit. This allowed for a continuous delivery of high quality lesson materials, even in classrooms full or students all downloading over congested school networks.

My work also included deep video encoding explorations to achieve maximum compression, tuned specifically to avoid artifacts in the animated shorts we were producing, which had large flat ranges of color. Specific tunes were used depending on the color, contrast, and amount of motion in each video, and I helped producers set up their pipelines to run these independently.

Meaningful Work

The impact of education-based work is what held the most meaning for me. Though often highly constrained by time and budget, I will forever be proud of this work due to the impact it has on our future generation.