Recourse Design is just an Indie Developer who spends his time growing trees/veges,
designing and programming digital electronics and living in the Unreal Engine.

History (some dates may not be 100% accurate, will recheck when I find my paper-based CV)

  • Started learning electronic basics and design around 1976 as a child.
  • Started learning computer programming basics around 1983 as a child.
  • As most devs started, wrote many games up to almost finished – things like top-down driving game (simple character based, similar to one on the Commodore Pet), helicopter rescue game (similar to Apple II choplifter), platformer game (similar to manic miner, then later one like thing on a spring), Asteroids, Snake, Pong, Block-out clone, text adventures, top-down space shooter (Alberon), solitaire (on a Sinclair QL), point-and-click adventure (Alfred the Carrot), shoot-em-up with player static in center while npcs rotate around, Dig-Dug type game, Pacman type game, Galaxy type game, Defender, Pinball, Soccer etc etc.
  • 1984 Worked after school cleaning a wood turnery to save for a C64. Bought some cheap old broken valve radio grams no-one wanted in a factory there, did them up and hired them out to the local university.
  • 1986 Did the first year of an NZCE in Electrical Engineering, working on holidays at NZPost.
  • 1987-88 Worked at NZPost (Telecom division) as a Systems Programmer predominantly using JCLs and COBOL on a FAECOM M180. After just over a year there the government split NZPost into 3 companies and privatized them. They then proceeded to centralize everything and laid us all off, causing a large job shortage for quite a while.
  • 1989-90 Ran a small lawn mowing business called “The Lawn Moa” (NZ thing) – until someone crashed into my car while driving, taking me out of action for a few months and totalling the car (did write a large chunk of a top-down shooter while in recovery though).
  • 1990 Worked the night shift as a data entry clerk for a trucking firm.
  • 1990 Wrote a game for a company educating about asthma (called Beko Blaster) in asm and sold it to them.
  • Between 1990 and 1994 wrote Amiga Demos and boot demos in asm with a demo group (NZ Express).
  • 1994-1995 Worked at the local City Council initially porting the last of their COBOL code over to C, then as their Unix Administrator.
  • 1995-1996 wrote a large amount of a game engine on the Amiga using Amiga E/asm. Sadly the Amiga faded out and I moved to PC.
  • 1996-1997 worked at the local university as the tech support guy in the library.
  • 1996-1997 Polyworked, writing a Digital Signage system in C/asm (Watcom C) which was used around my home town for around 10 years. (Panorama)
  • 1997-1998 shifted to the big smoke and worked for a team writing disk cloning software (GHOST).
  • 1998-2012 after the sale of GHOST, a friend, myself and the previous owner of GHOST formed a company (called SkunkWorks software at the time) to write a multi-media presentation program, initially called “Focus”.
    We worked on this for many years, selling it as shareware. It received many low key awards. The software was renamed to LiquidMedia fairly quickly, and after a cease and desist letter from Lockheed Martin’s lawyers we changed our company name to SkunkLabs Software (we had just had several hundred stuffed skunkie toys made for a show so needed the skunk name still in there). The program was coined as “PowerPoint on Steroids” by our marketing team – but I made sure the software was Presentations by day, but a fully functional game engine by night.
  • 2005 – had a break from LM for a series of jaunts to Europe where I worked for an American company writing Deployment systems (UIU, BigBang LLC), then a Dutch Entrepreneur where I wrote a multi-lingual buy/sell site using c#/javascript.
  • 2012 – Back to LM – I had re-written our DX9 3D engine to be more scene based (all the gui was completely 3D too) and was contemplating embarking on all the shaders when I met UE4.0 – all my plans changed, it was already doing the things I was planning, plus a whole lot more things I hadn’t even thought of. Time to rethink:
  • 2015-2016 – Embarked on writing a plugin for PowerPoint (SlideScape) that used UE4 for transitions between the slides, seamlessly flipping between the UE scene and the PowerPoint one. All UE data was converted into BMP files and embedded in PowerPoint scenes so didn’t need any external files. Never got to completion with that, Microsoft released a free add-on that did very simplistic paths like Prezi which discouraged the investors.
  • 2016 had a contract to model a tiny home, right down to each nail/screw/weld
  • 2017-present work from home on UE Plugins and my game.
  • 2020 had a contract to design and program the MCU side of some security devices along with their Lora wireless and a custom one-wire configuration device.
  • 2024 worked for a game studio as a Technical Artist. I’m not sure how much I can say about this so will just leave it there for now.

Pretty much from around the age of 13 I’ve had some game or game concept on the go.

I’ve been building a game sci-fi universe and series of stories that go with it since around 2010, and have made several attempts before committing to the current game. I’ve got the main characters created (using Character Creator and iClone for the animations) and their backgrounds sorted along with a lot of the cut-scenes, some dialog and their interactions firmly in my head.

The main character, Ryker, (the tee-shirt is just a placeholder for now) is ex-army, hired as an air martial on a flight carrying tourists to a world class tropical resort island. The island also hosts international committees and conferences with world leaders attending. There is an important political meeting about to start, with flights due to come in after the flight you’re on. The game starts with you landing at the airport and then being assigned to guard the airport while these flights arrive.

What happens next is where the fun begins.

The Island is very special, it has many physics bending properties, caused by an ancient accident. These get explained throughout the game, but some are shown right from the start – one of which are portals on the island to other parts of the world and different times – some have been exploited as tourist attractions (one is a portal to a snow covered mountain, so is used as a ski slope) There are also relics of other civilizations that have crossed the portals in the past and built shrines and monuments.

The island also has more recent history. It was taken over during WW2 as a base in the equatorial pacific, with infrastructure built including a settlement, large forts and battlements, batteries and a dam.

The combination of the above make it the worlds most popular holiday destination.

The game will have 3 parts, the first part covers missions all around the island, surrounding islands and more – there are extensive cave networks, some of which have been repurposed as tunnels and fortresses, and sewer systems (not currently added to level in the latest game). The game moves on to traveling to the moon where some secrets are revealed, along with a method of then traveling to Mars where the culmination of events happens along with the tools/weapons needed for the final boss fight back on the island.

The first UE game for this storyline I started creating was a replica of the big smoke city I’d been living in before shifting into the country. It quickly became apparent that it needed too many custom materials and textures – my 1080ti couldn’t handle it and I still needed more experience about optimizing. It was at that point I got the contract for the security devices so I had a pause for about a year.

The next one went a lot better, I’d written more plugins at that point and had a fairly good idea on how much stuff I could throw at the UE4.25 screen so I had a decent island level 2km x 2km with roads/railway and city/gas stations, electric utilities, vehicles etc – all running around 90FPS on my 1080ti – but it wasn’t big enough – I wanted a full 4km runway, lots of distance between certain parts and I really wanted to create big tropical beaches and bays – I needed a bigger level.

So UE5 came along, and having gone through the iterations of UE4 I decided to do no more than experiment until 5.5 came out – I’ve built and re-built a 144km2 map many times now in many ways – it’s just the size I want for my game, it gives just the right impressions.

Currently I’m still sculpting and painting the level in my (very limited) free time – my main time is spent between land maintenance (this time last year I was working full time at a game studio and trying to keep my head above water with the plugins so had no time to tame the jungle) and polishing up the game framework, which is the rdInst plugin – it has most of the render/streaming/proxy/pickup system in it, doing all the grunt work.