Ricardo Costa

Alta B is a 3D interactive poster with a human-like character that can talk and interact with the public on a kiosk at the famous Irving Plaza venue in NY. It took advantage of cutting-edge rendering and natural language processing technologies. I managed the entire Unreal Engine implementation, system and kiosk architecture, and AWS hosting on Verizon's 5G Edge computing network.

Nobu is a real estate virtual tour in real time using Unreal Engine. It featured fully baked lighting and realistic rendering, and it could run from any browser since it was pixel streamed from AWS. Multiple users could join a session and share the tour experience. I oversaw the Unreal Engine implementation and all functionalities, including the multiplayer logic.

I was the lead developer at KEYS, creating the metaverse experience in Unreal Engine 5. We used cutting-edge technologies to provide a triple-A experience to any user with a web browser on mobile or desktop.

Cockfight is a 3D mobile RPG/card battle multiplayer game prototype created in 2018.

I was the lead programmer and architect of both the game client and server. The client was based on Unreal Engine 4. It was optimized for mobile platforms and leverages GPU shaders and a variety of rendering techniques.

The server was written in modern C++ and Lua, a powerful scripting language whose development team I was part of during college. It featured high-performance, multi-threaded networking, and REST APIs to communicate with cloud services.

I was also one of the game designers, defining gameplay rules and monetization strategies.

I was the game designer and lead programmer of Brabexia, a massively-multiplayer online 2D RPG game (MMORPG) for Windows and Linux PCs that I created as a hobby, inspired by some of my favorite online games back then. It was online from 2005 to 2008.

I mainly worked on the game server written from the ground up in C++ and Lua. As a real-time game, it required low-latency networking and thousands of simultaneous players. Such a performance level was achieved with parallelism, profiling tools, and highly-optimized code. During peak hours, the game hosted about 7,000 players online.

The computer-controlled characters were based on numerous AI techniques such as A* path-finding, state machines, and behavior trees, providing a challenging gameplay experience to the players.

The 2D game client was based on an open-source project that used OpenGL. It was adapted to my game server by rewriting the networking protocol entirely.