Nitzan Wilnai

Current

Founder at VGViews Inc.

Past

Founder at VGViews Inc.
Software Engineer at Electronic Arts
Founder at Engineous Games

Software Engineer at Yahoo! Games

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Education

University of California, Santa Barbara

Connections

184 connections

Industry

Entertainment

Websites

My Company

Nitzan Wilnai’s Experience

Founder

VGViews Inc.

(Entertainment industry)

June 2008 — Present (1 year 6 months)

Working on multi-platform video games.

Launched Tatomic, an action puzzle game for the Apple iPhone: http://tatomic.com
Founder

VGViews Inc.

(Internet industry)

July 2007 — June 2008 (1 year )

Social networking for video game reviews. Launched Jan. 08.

Wrote entire site from scratch using PHP, CSS, Javascript and mySQL.
Site features include:
Profiles
Friends
Adding Games
Reviewing Games
Rating User's Game Reviews
Comment System (for profiles, games and reviews)
Forum
Internal Messaging System
News Feed
Email Alerts

Employed 16 part-time contractors to help shore up content.
10 game reviewers and 6 bloggers.

At its peak site was receiving 5000 unique users per month.
Software Engineer

Electronic Arts

(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; ERTS; Computer Games industry)

January 2005 — June 2007 (2 years 6 months)

2/07 - 6/07 Rendering Team Engineer on Dead Space Xbox 360 / PS3.
As a member of the rendering team was in charge of adding new rendering features to the core engine used by current and future games.

8/06 - 2/07 Godfather Wii and Godfather PS3.
Ported Mobface to the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii consoles on time, in memory limits and above performance requirements.

2/06 - 8/06 Godfather 360.
As the lead MobFace engineer, ported the MobFace system to a new next-generation Xbox 360 engine.
Added support for Specular and Normal maps in MobFace.
Modified MobFace to be accessible in-game rather then only from the front-end.

1/05 - 2/06 The Godfather The Game for Playstation 2 and Xbox
Took over ownership of the MobFace feature.
Added morphing support to the pipeline, real-time in-game morphing, memory allocation system, and the baking and scissoring code to get a finished character into the game on both the Playstation 2 and Xbox consoles.
Founder

Engineous Games

(Public Company; 1-10 employees; Computer Games industry)

June 2003 — January 2005 (1 year 8 months)

Founder of Engineous Games Inc. Responsible for designing and creating Super Hamster Plane, a 3D Action-Party flying game. Managed 1 employee and 3 contractors.

As the sole programmer, responsible for all aspects of code-design and implementation. Created a fully working demo that included 8 single player levels and 1 multi-player split-screen level.

The game engine's object oriented game design allows for easier console porting. The game’s 3D Engine can render in both OpenGL and Direct3D.

Includes a rigid-body physics engine, stencil shadows (including Carmack's Reverse), collision detection and response, frustum culling, quaternion-based movements and cameras, internal scripting engine, complete UI and menu system, dynamic lighting, game-pad support and a 2-player split-screen dogfight mode.

Written in C++, STL, OpenGL and DirectX.

Screenshots and game-play movies can be found on the game’s website at www.superhamsterplane.com
Software Engineer

Yahoo! Games

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; YHOO; Computer Games industry)

October 2000 — June 2003 (2 years 9 months)

Designed, programmed, tested, published and supported single and multiplayer games.

Created the games Dice Slider, Dots, Naval Command, Go Stop and Graffiti. (Go Stop accounts for 1/3 of the total traffic to Yahoo! Games in Korea.)

Designed and programmed the alpha version of a role playing game named Dungeons of Mihr. Dungeons of Mihr features persistent characters and a randomly-generated, multi-player dungeon crawl with tactical combat. Dungeons of Mihr's content-driven design allows producers to easily add content by modifying the SQL tables driving the game.

All games written using Java. Dungeons of Mihr used an SQL database to store content. All games (except Dungeons of Mihr) are playable and available to the general public at games.yahoo.com.