Dan Donato \ Dvdonato@gmail.com

Career History

Total Respawn  – Lead Software Engineer and Technical Advisor                          Nov 2020 – Present

  • Develop a multiplayer virtual reality game in Unity3D for a live arcade experience.
  • Develop tools for the design team to test ideas and make gameplay changes.
  • Advise the team on available third party tools and source control best practices.

Ghost Lab Games – Lead Software Engineer: Contract                                            Jan 2021 – Present

  • Integrate the work from the narrative, music, and animation teams to develop a single player game in Unity3D.
  • Develop a tool for narrative to execute commands as part of character dialogue.
  • Construct builds with controls for the music team to test pacing and implementation of their work.

Listen Inc  –  Software Developer in Test                                                             Mar 2020 – Oct 2020

  • Maintain and improve the Jenkins automated build system and Ansible playbooks to generate Jenkins agents.
  • Develop tools to create statistical reports of software performance.
  • Develop Python tools to automate hardware and software testing.
  • Refactor and document legacy code written in Python and Groovy.

Demiurge Studios (SEGA Networks) –  QA Tester                                                Apr 2015 – Mar 2017

  • Tested and documented bugs in JIRA for Marvel Puzzle Quest, Puzzle & Glory, and Crazy Taxi Gazillionaire on PC [Steam], iOS, and Android platforms.
  • Collaborated with full stack engineers to determine the cause of complex bugs.
  • Coordinated customer service and community management staff for the top grossing cross-platform Marvel Puzzle Quest.
  • Communicated with users to document and test reported issues. 
  • Participated in the agile software development process, working with three different scrum teams.

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Start Something  –  Mechanical Engineering prototyping                                   Aug 2012 – Apr 2015

  • Managed and tracked deliverables in Microsoft Excel.
  • Rapid Prototyping of potential projects to determine feasibility.

      

Education

University at Buffalo

  • B.S. Computer Science: Completed Fall 2019.
  • B.A. Economics: Completed Spring 2009.

Programming and Software

Languages: C#/C++, Python, Java, Javascript, SQL, Mips assembly.

General: Unity3D, JIRA bug tracking, Github, Perforce, OpenCV, Jenkins, Ansible, Docker, Mixpanel analytics, Linux, Audacity, Adobe Photoshop, Robot Operating System

Independent Portfolio 

Data Processing and Collection – Contract: Design the data structure and presentation of user’s activity for an online learning platform.

Virtual Reality – Puzzle: “Escape the witch’s grotto” Potion mixing escape room.

Unity3D – Game: “Ok Heist” Putting a team together for a heist pulled from a Google doc.

Android app: Digital version of the card game “Egyptian Ratscrew” with local multiplayer and computer players on a single device.

Android app: “Drop the Mic” Initially meant to be a test of posting an app on the Google Play Store resulted in 600,000 downloads.

Writing/Editing:  Freelance: Two science books for 10-12 year olds about ‘Weathering and Erosion’ and ‘Mixtures vs Solutions’.

Hack-a-Thons and Game Jams 

VR/AR: Microsoft Hololens, Google Project Tango, Hack Reality Virtually 2016-19 and Intel’s Realsense.

Other: Attended Global Game Jam 2014-19, MIT Escape the Room, Purple Monkey game jam.