Kip Ricker

Point of contact for all technical needs--acting CTO

Lead a team of 14 engineers on a high profile Apple Arcade title

Managed remote team of 7 engineers while growing internal team to take over full production

Hit all milestone dates on time and released our title on schedule

Planned architecture for high velocity cross-platform development

Worked on modifying UnrealBuildTool to support Apple Arcade development, including fixing issues with MacOS build signing, TVOS packaging issues, and new Apple Arcade build requirements

Responsible for all steps of release submissions (External code privacy audits, platform TRC audits, final binary submissions)

Worked with Apple and AWS on new and proposed features and services

Distilled platform requirements into guidelines for the design team via internal wiki docs and issue tracking

Responsible for reviewing GDDs and TDDs against our platform Technical Requirements Checklists

Worked on strategy for porting our games from iOS to PS4 and Switch, starting with getting our hockey title running on both consoles

Responsible for GDPR, CCPA, and COPPA compliance and data policies

Worked with legal counsel on our products privacy policy, EULA, and technical aspects of our contract negotiations with Epic, Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Audiokinetic, and Microsoft

Lead planning and testing of our GameLift and API scaling strategies

Worked with AWS solution architects to make our backend capable of supporting over 250,000 CCU

Mentored engineers

Designed a Unity Plugin that allows for easy and robust integration into many different game formats

Built a Unity canvas object that would map its location and size to native iOS and Android elements, allowing our React built Plexchat plugin to run in a Webview with a rect controlled by Unity

Designed the changes needed for our platform to be CVAA compliant while consulting WB legal counsel, and consulted with internal WB teams about making their games compliant

Worked with 3 internal WB studios to integrate Plexchat into their games (unreleased)

Lead mobile client development using React Native with a team of 5

Worked on distributed stateful server written in C++

Built server/client communication architecture with Protocol Buffers and a custom Protocol Buffer diffing engine

Created ExpressJS middleware patterns for SaaS portal authentication and authorization

Worked closely with Product and UX designers throughout development

Mentored engineers

Built adaptive Auto Layout UI with UIKit elements over an OpenGL view

Improved threading using iOS’s Quality of Service classes

Designed a cross platform engine built on Cocos2d-x with the goal of having a single Javascript codebase that could be updated over the air on all platforms simultaneously

This engine is now used to drive the company’s largest games, including Casino, Lifeline, and Fairway Solitaire

Worked with the tools team to empower designers and artists with more data driven functionality across the engine

Designed a content management system that would only include referenced assets, asset changes, and remove assets that were no longer used

The game engine itself was also delivered and updated through the content management system

Data driven focus and efficient content management allowed for a 6 month client life cycle

Mentored engineers

Built Unity editor tools to build and run on iOS, debug, and deploy to Testflight without Xcode and consulted with teams at EA and Maxis on improving their own Unity editor tools

Designed a Unity asset pipeline for versioning, and hosting asset bundles

Designed a Maya node animation exporter and playback for customizable characters in Cocos2d

Designed a layered construction and destruction system for 2D buildings making it possible to created each state of a building with only a few images, reducing memory use and the time it took for artists to create each building