Phil Chu

Technicat LLC

Developing software since the 80s

Work

working for myself

– Present

Consulting and contract development, self-publishing apps and games.

working for the man

Journeyed through the semiconductor, defense, space, computer graphics, mobile Internet, and video game industries.

Education

Johns Hopkins University

Computer Science

Masters degree

Courses
  • AI

  • computer graphics

  • automata

  • algorithms

  • compilers

  • functional programming

Projects

Fedicat

developer and publisher at Technicat
– Present

Mastodon/fediverse iOS app in progress, available on Testflight

Talk Dim Sum

developer and publisher at Technicat
– Present

Your dim sum companion. Read about dim sum and learn how to pronounce the dishes. Available on Itch.io and the App Store.

HyperBowl

developer, publisher, and licensee at Technicat

Be the ball! A Unity reimplementation of the classic bowling game, licensed from Hyper Entertainment.

  • One of MacLife's Greatest iPhone Apps of 2009

  • Available on the App Store and Steam

  • Formerly available on the Amazon Appstore, Nook store, Itch.io, and various crappy app stores (crappstores?)

Cinefex iPad Edition

developer at Cinefex
– Present

An iPad reader for the Cinefex visual effects magazine, with extras such as videos and image galleries.

  • Facilicated transfer from original developer to Cinefex LLC

  • Fixed in-app-purchase issues

  • Updated video player after Apple dropped support for previous API

  • Updated issue download code after Apple dropped support for previous API (notice a trend?)

  • Optimized startup time and browsing

  • Updated to comply with ever-changing Apple requirements

Emo-Ray vs. the Intergalactic Teddy Bears

programmer at Heavy Water

A Playstation Home driving/shooting game with alien invader teddy bears.

  • Implemented collision physics among cars

  • Programmer credit displayed in-world

RC Rally

programmer at Heavy Water

A Playstation Home multiplayer racing game.

  • Made some UI fixes just before release

Blue Mars

programmer at Avatar Reality

A 3D virtual world implemented with CryEngine.

  • Documented the Lua API and framework for creating minigames on the community wiki (a CryEngine wiki even copied part of it!)

  • Integrated newer versions of Scaleform, including Scaleform IME for localization

  • Tweaked CryEngine physics to support an in-world golf game

  • Attended in-world developer meetings. Better than Zoom.

Nendo

programmer at Izware

A nifty 3D modeler originally developed at Nichimen Graphics.

  • Updated to work on Windows XP.

Darkwatch

programmer at High Moon Studios

A vampire western for Playstation 2 and Xbox. demo builds.

  • Worked on HUD elements for health, ammo, special powers

  • Implemented split-screen (multiple Renderware cameras) for multiplayer

  • Added PAL support

  • Integrated Lua scripting for audio effects and HUD elements

  • Received programmer credit (but oddly required to list city of birth)

Fugu Games

developer at Technicat
– Present

Small games released as webplayers, Mac widgets, and mobile apps.

  • Fugu Maze, a suspense maze walkthrough that got twenty thousand downloads on the App Store in the first week and then a trickle after I started charging for it

  • Fugu Bowl, a simple proof of concept for HyperBowl that got low ratings but was my most downloaded app (until Apple rejected upgrades).

Tech Deck: Bare Knuckle Grind

programmer at Visionscape Interactive

A skateboarding game bundled with Tech Deck figures.

  • Implemented installers so each game could be packaged separately and installed in any sequence

  • Added dynamic shadows to replace the placeholder blob shadows (and then switched back to the blog shadows because the art director liked them better)

  • Set up a push-button scripted build system so the producers could create a latest build from the subversion source at any time

HyperBowl

programmer at Hyper Entertainment

A 3D attraction bowling game, rolling in fanciful locations.

  • Added localization support, particularly for Jillian's installations in Montreal (French)

  • Implemented support for (potential) new lanes, e.g. a toy room, motocross slope...

  • Profiled, optimized (those lanes kept getting bigger and bigger)

  • Fixes for new graphics cards (pesky w-buffer...)

  • Changes to facilitate arcade and PC versions (I'm there in the mobygames credits)

Neomar

programmer at Neomar

One of the first mobile web browsers, conforming to WAP standards.

  • Implemented an HTTP proxy in Java for the Neomar WAP gateway

  • Launched on Motient's Blackberry service

  • Company assets acquired by Good Technology

Leverage for Scheduling

programmer at Interval Logic

Supply chain scheduling software for semiconductor fabs. Managed the group reponsible for installation, XML interoperability, and user interfaces.

Leverage for Planning

programmer at Interval Logic

Supply chain planning software for semiconductor fabs. Upgraded from Tcl to TclPro.

Mirai

consultant at Nichimen Graphics

Successor to N-World

  • Fixed some graphics code (which I eventually realized was originally written by me)

  • visited 3D hardware vendors in Silicon Valley (including a young nVidia) to get test cards and discuss OpenGL issues

  • Used to make Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies.

N-World

programmer at Nichimen Graphics

A 3D modeling and animation package descended once upon a time from the Symbolics Graphics Group (written in Lisp, shhh!).

  • Ported from IrisGL to OpenGL on SGI workstations

  • Ported from Irix to Windows NT

  • Manager of Core Software (I made up the title)

  • Used in the making of Mario 3D.

ORBIS

programmer at JHU Applied Physics Lab

An expert system for submarine simulation.

  • Added support for local area network simulations (i.e. games)

  • Added Distributed Interactive Simulation support for wide-area network simulations (wargames)

  • Donned a submarine uniform and took part in two exercises like I was in The Hunt for Red October

Proposal Entry Processor

programmer at Space Telescope Science Institute

A syntax-directed Emacs mode used by astronomers and Institute staff to prepare and edit Space Telescope observation proposals.

  • A member of the proposal preparation staff asked for my project to be continued after I left (but alas, no takers).

Database Accelerator

programmer at MIT

A computer architecture based on content-addressable memories. Implemented compilers and simulators and simulations for the Database Accelerator and Content-Addressable Parallel Processor.

DROID

programmer at Texas Instruments

A VLSI layout synthesis tool, used in-house to design new products, running on TI Explorer Lisp Machines. Added optimizations and other improvements, skipped most of the meetings (also an optimization).

Multilisp

student at MIT

Bachelors thesis project implementing an Othello game in Multilisp (Multello) to run on the Concert 32-processor computer, trying various parallelism strategies to compare processor utilization and final performance.

  • Wrote the thesis in LaTeX on a Symbolics Lisp Machine.

  • Cited in a PhD thesis.

START

student at MIT

Part time student work on a graph display for the the START natural language parser, then running on Symoblics Lisp machines.

Awards

Leverage for Planning/Scheduling

Awarded by Interval Logic

They misspelled my name.

Maritime Simulation Demonstration

Awarded by ARPA

They misspelled my name, too.

First Hubble Servicing Mission

Awarded by Space Telescope Science Institute

Includes a patch flown on the first Hubble servicing mission. Best workplace award ever. And they got my name right.

Certificates

Publications

Skills

App Development

  • Flutter
  • J2ME
  • SwiftUI
  • Xamarin

Game Development

  • CryEngine
  • Godot
  • Havok
  • Qube
  • Renderware
  • Ren'py
  • Scaleform
  • Unity
  • Unreal

Graphics

  • Direct3D
  • OpenGL
  • Processing

Programming

  • 6502
  • BASIC
  • C
  • C++
  • C#
  • Dart
  • Java
  • Javascript
  • Lisp
  • Lua
  • Objective-C
  • Perl
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Swift
  • Tcl

Writing

  • English
  • books
  • press releases

Languages

English

Native speaker

Cantonese

Food

Korean

Kdrama phrases

Interests

Cats

  • adoption
  • cat cafe
  • lucky cat
  • samurai cat

Reading

  • Asian-American fiction
  • graphic design
  • graphic novels
  • history
  • philosophy
  • scifi
  • spy stories
  • technology

Viewing

  • kdrama
  • scifi
  • MMA

Learning

  • English
  • Spanish
  • Chinese
  • Korean
  • Japanese

Listening

  • Motown
  • NPR Podcasts

Playing

  • piano
  • video games

References

I still think you're a good programmer.

Former client

I've got a genius app idea!

Prospective client