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Marko Permanto - Game Designer & Programmer

- work experience. 💼

- highlights. ✨

✂️ Budget Cuts franchise 🔪

- Game Director, Game Designer & Programmer

Budget Cuts is a VR stealth action game franchise.

On Budget Cuts I acted as game director, game designer, level designer, NPC & animation programmer, and did various gameplay programming as well as most of the VFX. A lot of time and effort was spent on a polished and physically-plausible experience, directing everyone to reach this goal. Accessible VR being new at the time, most of the challenges were R&D and UX related rather than technical. Among many other things I directed & designed the popular Adam NPC encounter, as well as implementing all of the NPC logic, physical interactions & combat design.

Budget Cuts: Ultimate is a merging of both Budget Cuts 1 & 2 for Quest, requiring a technical overhaul to reach the performance required for mobile VR. Both the original games were struggling with performance on PC, so the technical challenge was significant. Among other things, I did:

• Lead the porting team
• GPU & CPU performance measurements and assessments
• Complete shader library rewrite
• Multi-threading of various systems
• Custom portal based culling
• Tile-based GPU binning friendly mesh format
• Extreme pooling solutions for animation, physics, AI
• Custom LOD solutions
• Solutions for specific cases such as terrain rendering

🌊 Garden of the Sea 🐟

- Technical Artist

Garden of the Sea is a chill gardening & petting-zoo VR game.

While I wasn't part of the core team on Garden of the Sea, I stepped in to help with some visuals. I developed:

• Custom light falloff for soft self-shadow -> shadow-map transition
• Sea rendering
• Water effects
• Grass LOD

Later when the non-VR port of Garden of the Sea was being developed, the porting contractors had a GPU driver crash on Nintendo Switch that they were not able to solve for several months. I figured it was worth taking some time from other projects to help out, and I managed to solve it in 15 minutes! The crash log indicated reading uninitialized memory in the soil fragment shader. Looking through other bugs listed by QA, I saw a screenshot of soil rendering random data at island edges, which for some reason was brushed off as an unrelated minor visual bug, but just as I suspected this was entirely related to the crash and a good hint for what was wrong. It turned out the soil compute shader was writing out of bounds, and the soil fragment shader was reading out of bounds as well. Both the crash and the "minor" visual bug got fixed.

⚔️ Crossings 🏹

- Combat Designer & Lead Programmer

Crossings is a coop-multiplayer VR roguelite action game.

I was combat designer & overall tech lead for Crossings. From a tech standpoint Crossings was meant to be a stepping stone for the team to familiarize themselves with writing C-style code for future projects, so as a compromise I came up with the idea to separate the code into "Simulation" & "Presentation" layers. Code in "Simulation" was the game logic, and used no Unity components or features, meaning custom physics, entity management etc. It was also written with easy serialization in mind for robust networking and saving/loading. This bit was C# in "C-style", using no classes or OOP of any kind. "Presentation" on the other hand used whatever features are available in Unity to represent the data generated by the simulation layer as GameObjects, MeshRenderers etc. Anything that happens in the presentation layer is transient, and can be rebuilt from simulation data on demand. I was responsible for:

• Overall tech plan & leadership
• Rendering approach & solutions
• Shader library
• Tech art solutions
• Entity management system with custom memory allocator
• Tooling for converting from Unity GameObjects & scenes to our custom entities
• Custom networking inspired by Quake 3 networking model, including tools for integrity validation
• Custom physics engine with LBVH & Spatial Hashing broad-phase, capsule & sphere vs mesh narrow-phase
• A lot of various gamecode like NPC polish, some interaction systems, melee blocking, directional hit detection, gesture-based magic casting
• Multi-threading & optimization
• Combat design:
  • Melee combat with series of directional hits for "combos"
  • Blocking NPC attacks in melee
  • Gestures requiring no buttons to cast magic

- about. 🤔

Marko Permanto - Game Designer & Programmer

Compulsively developing games since the age of thirteen, professionally active since 2012.

I attended Futuregames vocational Game Development school in Stockholm, Game Design programme 2010-2012.

Professional roles I’ve had range from Tech Lead, Network Programmer, NPC & Animation Programmer, Shader Programmer, Gameplay Programmer - to Game Director, Game Designer, Level Designer, Team Management and Board member.

I have released 15 commercial titles, excluding all different SKUs.

I'm very much an "indie-spirit" in the sense that I am capable of - and often do - many parts of game development myself. While my professional experience primarily features programmer-type roles, I did start my game development journey with basic 3D graphics, sound effects & level design. I have a comprehensive understanding of the entire game development pipeline.

E-mail me or use some of the "socials" options on the main page!