I am Thomas Porta, a programmer and technical artist. I studied Game Development at the National Film and Television school. Previously I was a Machine Learning Scientist. I also have a MSc in Machine Learning from UCL and a BSc in Physics from McGill University. It’s fair to say I like Science and Engineering.

Skills

I work really well as part of a team and enjoy exchanging ideas with peers and friends. I am not scared to cut large parts of my work if this helps make the game more focused. I live by the sentence, “Ideas are cheap and plentiful”. I manage my time well and always deliver things on time. I am driven and always have an eye on the goal and the bigger picture.

I am familiar with these engines and platforms,

  • Unity (URP and Built-in RP)
  • Unreal Engine
  • Playdate SDK

I am proficient in these coding languages,

  • C#
  • C++
  • HLSL
  • Lua
  • Python

I have experience coding gameplay mechanics and systems for games. I also code shaders in HLSL/CG and am comfortable using shader graphs. I can do both post processing and standard per-object shaders.

Software

Unity, Unreal, Maya, Blender, Photoshop, Substance Painter and Designer

Favourite Games

I play a wide variety of games. I enjoy both competitive and non competitive games, but if I had to pick a few foundational games I’d pick the following,

  • Dishonored and more widely anything Arkane has made for putting the player first.
  • Alien Isolation because of its fun AI and its incredible atmosphere.
  • Bloodborne for its perfect systems.
  • Skyrim for its cozy atmosphere. And a special thanks to all the modders who passionately support it expecting no monetary reward.
  • Control for its faithfulness to Brutalist architecture and attention to technical details.

Hobbies

I like running, football and taking pictures of buildings. You can find some of my pictures here.