^{Marc Hewitt}
ATX Game Dev

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Unity Physics for Begineers

Small intro to the different aspects of Unity Physics meant for begineers.
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Making Your Designers Life Easier

A collection of coding articles helping programmers understand how other team members work.
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Build Systems for
Commercial Work

How to setup a studio's build systems for efficient commercial Game development.
Coming Soon...

I was entrusted with our core F2P monetization system and is one of the largest single core features I built at Lunchbox. The work spanned on-off over the 2 years based off our teams needs.The basics is very similar to CS:GO's gun texture skin system, but instead of loot boxes, players use earn-able/purchasable resources they can apply to ships through a custom crafting system.And on eunique aspect is the ability to swap out parts of the ship's mesh, tied to our custom procedural animation system.The final in-game UI was done by our UI/UX designer and UI Engineer, though I helped refactor and improve the skinning system for their needs.I worked alongside an amazing 3D artist / Tech Artist (Gerry Ricard) in developing the core system and tooling for him. And worked with our Designer/Founder Arik Torkelson who came up with the system on the monetization and data structures.

Optimized
Unity3D and Netcode

While optimization was always a team-wide effort at Lunchbox, for my 3 core displines it was Tools, Netcode,and Unity Optimizations.As we had the aim to keep the SteamDeck at a stable 60FPS in our ECS Job System architecture.Some of my contributions included custom Mirror KCP improvements, re-connection handling, Server Authoritative protection/anti-cheat, headless stripping, solving a 32GB memory leak, and improving Unity's Scene transition speed.I also used a scene based object pool and other tricks to decrease load times of min-spec devices from 80 to 40 seconds with future after release plans to further reduce by reworking our scene handling to more of a preloaded worldstream setup.

Tools For
QA | Art | Design | Live Service

With a small team, we needed each department to move fast. So tools were developed for each department off their immediate needs.Big add was being able to bring a custom HTTP library of my own making to the studio to bootstrap our backend team's RESTful protobuff tech stack.Just some of the tools built and improved include:
Cutscene tool, Simulated Auto Testing, Heatmaps, runtime line charts, structured Logging, QA Cheats, QA support tools, launch args, build systems, doodad spawning tools, island mirroring, spline cables with lightmaps, procedural generation debug tools, Multiplay SDK integration, custom QoS setup, VO'd Tutorial Sequence, AI Bots to teach new-to-MOBA players, timescale refactors, post-prefab save hashed batch process, and a lot more.

Led a gamedev team of Ten to awards at main industry conference I/ITSEC

I spent a year as team lead after our CTO and replacement CTO left the company. I led the team from start to finish on producing our v1 of the companies core software off an existing legacy vertical-slice prototype.This v1 demo'd at I/ITSEC and was Awarded Unity3D - Creators Award Best XR LVC. We also were awarded the conference attendance's popular vote for most innovative solution.

Scoped, planned, and helped win 8-figure Military Virtualization contracts in Aerospace and Mlitary Training (LVC)

Beyond just coding core features. I used my business backend to accurately scope, plan, and complete several 7-figure and 8-figure government contracts, as well as worked on a DARPA project. These contracts went to funding the studio, and each project was inline with furthering the core v1 product.

Digital Twin Cloud Computing in Unity3D, including read/write access of a Unity Cloud VM, in a Unity client instance.

A core aspect of my development work was Cloud Computing focused. This gets technical fast if we dive into Azure GPU Cloud instances, but the overall reason was we needed the ability to run a Unity3D instance within a Unity3D Instance (as well as other military desktop software). And have it functioning within a WebGL version of Unity. This was performed with a custom video stream system and displayed in-engine on 3d models of computer monitors, big screens as see-able in the screenshot.So the computer screen you see in the screenshot here, is actually intractable. As in you are changing a real life computer's screen (or cloud computer instance) through the virtual world mouse interactions. And its refreshing real-time for all other connected players.This allowed one to essentially see over the shoulder of a coworker, what they are working on in virtual space.A note:
The marketing images here are from early prototypes and are the publicly shared online images, not the final v1 imagery which was never released by the company due to sudden layoffs, so I am unable to share the final product.

Sandtable Visulization and Playback

A major aspect of LVC training is the ability to run simulations and then play them back for review with officers and analysts.This software acted as a visual interface for Any military simulation system. As well as providing playback controls which the simulators do not natively have as they simply output .xml files.We did also have light simulation capability.

Ingestion micro-services for redacted military database

While unable to go into super specific details. Our software visualized a wide array of military data through multiple custom military data sources that came through a very custom military API database process. We received custom formatted XML files typically through this API.Part of what I created was normalizing the data through a custom ingestion micro service to a universal type that our Unity3D side could visualize uniformly over the network. While providing an ingestion SDK to allow the top secret folks to visualize the confidential data in air-locked spaces.And of course as micro-services had some docker configs to containerize it. We did do some k8 in-house but military contract meant handing off just docker and source files.

FullStack C#
Including custom
TCP Transport handling

Custom TCP transport and basic netcode to support a relay server and undisclosable military contract details. Custom HTTP library with WebGL support. Custom JWT Authentication in Asp.net with data layer of ADO .net with stored procedures for customers. Docker, light K8 usage.A fun mini task was getting all the services, tools, servers, and tech setup working off a $15 raspberry pi server and cheap laptop so our conference setup could fit in a literal secure pelican case for display selling purposes.

Got to hire & train up several junior individuals in Dev, UI/UX, and QA

A major accomplishment of mine at the studio was due to a department reset after technical leadership changes. I was able to press for changes in our hiring process and sell the importance of hiring talent, not just seniority.I was able to hire for, and train up young game developers. Including several unity game dev juniors, a backend junior, a junior QA, and a designer fresh from college with a PhD in VR UX.Through a mixture of pair programming with the team, mini learning projects, and reasonable responsibility increases over time to challenge them; it all combined to improving them fast while not burning them out. Several landed at much larger studios and were quickly promoted from these experiences.Their words on Linkedin (readable here) say it better then I can in how valuable that was to them.

Solving critical faults in a custom UI Framework for a DARPA project

I joined towards the end of a major DARPA project, and ended up fixing a major team vs team animosity between core team and the sub-contracted UI team .As well as fixed the faulty issues with both sides of the systems to get us from 10 units to 10,000 units.Prior both teams were very silo'd and did not communicate well. Me being a fresh face I was able to integrate myself into both teams, and help show both sides through profiling the software to show "proof" not "opinions" on core issues with implementation.And then helped both teams resolve the core issues in both code and communication. As well as find and fix the core architecture problem of their React-Like event system in C# UGUIThey were instantiating 1000 new objects, in the same canvas space, on any UI interaction. Which technically is exactly how React works, but React has a shadowdom concept to avoid refreshing unchanged things, UGUI does not. UGUI is also 100x heavier then HTML.

6 years solo business, with contractors. Initially helping small businesses. Then specializing in design and marketing agencies lacking a technical expert where I'd help set them up to scale through automation services, technology consulting, training, tech stack setup, and digital marketing strategies.4 years partnered at PivotGround where I helped improved our now trademarked consulting process IMPACT METHOD®️, consulted for a 100+ year old nonprofit, and doubled several nonprofits revenue. Several donation automation campaigns I setup in 2018 are still running to this day with no to little changes.Then a leftover period movingto Austin TX late 2019, and transitioning clients over to trusted industry connections so I could retrain back into Game Engineering and Unity3D in Austin TX. As while I loved the psychology side of design and marketing, I wanted more crunchy technology challenges that Engineering provides.

Exacom QA911

| C# | Silverlight | SOA | MVVM | SQL |

1 year developer at Exacom building 911QA from scratch to release. Worked with millions of SQL rows worth of 911 phone call data, audio enhancement for court case, Silverlight 4 C# Prism MVVM with SOA architecture along with Telerik UI. Custom video player from scratch. Used ORM EntityFramework back in v1

Animation Game Graphic Programming AS from NHTI

| DX9 | C++ | Flash | C# | XNA | SQL |

College where I built proc gen, 3d engines, and got two paid internships. One teaching 4th graders XNA coding, and one building software for nonprofits including a released digital whiteboard tech.

_{©2025 Marc Hewitt. All rights reserved.}