Andrew Friedland

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About Me

This website is now a few years out of date. I currently work at Bungie and love it there. At some point I may get around to adding a project page for my last project at DigiPen, Leshy. Until I get around to updating everything and remove this paragraph, assume everything on this page and on my resume is old.


I am currently a Masters student at the DigiPen Institute of Technology and recently graduated with a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. As soon as I started studying computer science, I realized that I wanted to make games, and have been directing my education to get as much experience as I can in any field that I can relate to game development.

My coursework at Carnegie Mellon has given me a strong base in computer science. I learned the basics of working in a 3D environment from my Graphics course, I know how to set up and use socket connections from my Networks course, and I have learned about searching and planning in my AI course. In addition, the broad selection of languages I have used in my courses, from C and Java to SML and Perl, has given me a strong understanding of the different uses of languages as well as the skills to rapidly learn new ones.

I am now continuing my education at DigiPen, focusing much more tightly on game development. This last semester I took courses on C++, the fundamentals of game development, and curves and surfaces. One of my large projects from this last semester involved creating a component based engine from scratch and then building a small game using my new engine. This semester I am taking a course in advanced computer graphics, two courses on artificial intelligence, and a project course in which I will be making a game as part of a small team.

I also already have experience developing games outside of classes. In the summer of 2008, I worked as an intern at Treyarch, one of the studios owned by Activision. Among other assignments I had, I was responsible for recreating the text rendering system so that is could generate quads for each character on the fly instead of using stored meshes. In addition, I added hooks into the text rendering system to allow the same system to be used to display controller buttons and gestures on the UI. Over the summer of 2009, I taught myself how to use the iPhone SDK and created an iPhone game with one of my friends. In the summer of 2010 I worked with a friend to create a puzzle game with a level editor that can be compiled and run on both Windows and OSX. In addition to these projects, I have worked on two different games with the Game Creation Society at Carnegie Mellon: Project Origami and BeeStruction.