Curriculum Vitae

Michael Joyce — Performance-focused software developer with 12+ years in real-time systems, gameplay architecture, and production optimization.

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Email

[email protected]

Location

Montreal, Quebec

GitHub

@mikebjoyce

Professional Summary

Performance-focused software developer with 12+ years of experience building real-time gameplay systems and runtime architectures in Unity and C#. Co-founder and Lead Gameplay Systems Developer at Pansimula, where I architect high-performance gameplay systems and lead technical optimization across shipped titles. Profiling-driven by practice: I measure before optimizing and know when optimization actually matters. Since 2025 I've also worked in JavaScript backend and operational tooling, shipping five MIT-licensed plugins that run on live 100-player competitive servers, and in static web delivery. Proven educator with experience teaching C#, algorithms, and data structures in classroom settings.

Education

Bachelor of Arts — Philosophy

Concordia University, Montreal, QC

Completed 2025

Additional Coursework — Software Engineering & Computer Science

Concordia University, Montreal, QC

2012 – 2018

DEC — Liberal Arts

CEGEP, Quebec

September 2009 – May 2012

Core Specializations

  • • Real-time gameplay systems and runtime architecture
  • • Profiling-driven optimization and performance engineering
  • • Physics-heavy simulation systems
  • • Gameplay AI systems and pathfinding
  • • Runtime tooling and procedural systems
  • • Compute shader workflows (HLSL)
  • • Procedural and quasi-procedural gameplay systems
  • • Event-driven tooling and operational systems
  • • Technical problem-solving under production constraints

Work Experience

Pansimula Indie Game Studio

Co-Founder | Lead Gameplay Systems Developer

March 2017 – Present

  • • Co-founded studio and led design and development of Galactic Thunderdome, a physics-based brawler released on Steam (October 23rd, 2024).
  • • Largest single contributor to the codebase by commit count, roughly 3,400 of 12,400 commits across seven years and five developers.
  • • Contracted and delivered 4 educational titles to Legends of Learning under royalty-based agreements, with later contracts negotiated to retain studio IP rights.
  • • Architected and implemented core gameplay/runtime systems under heavy real-time simulation constraints, including gravity systems, projectile systems, adhesion mechanics, environmental hazards, AI systems, and procedural interaction systems.
  • • Served as primary performance-focused developer across production, profiling and resolving runtime bottlenecks, GC spikes, memory issues, and frame-time instability.
  • • Optimized physics-heavy gameplay systems to sustain >60 FPS in extreme scenarios involving multiple players, AI entities, destructible terrain, and interacting environmental systems.
  • • Designed extensive pooling and staged initialization systems to prevent frame hitching and maintain stable runtime performance in simulation-heavy gameplay scenarios.
  • • Designed and implemented character systems including ragdolls, hybrid keyframe and procedural animation systems, gun handling, physics interaction, gravity transitions, and zero-gravity gameplay behaviors.
  • • Built the adversarial AI, a heuristic state machine that plays through the same input interface as a human player rather than a parallel movement path, with sensor-based perception including incoming-projectile evaluation and dynamic A* pathfinding over destructible and reconstructible terrain.
  • • Optimized a GPU compute pipeline rasterizing mesh geometry to textures for stain and decal effects, resolving texture memory leaks and dispatch safety issues under sustained load.
  • • Built tooling and runtime systems improving iteration speed and usability for designers and content creators.
  • • Mentored junior developers through technical problem-solving, debugging, and systems implementation support.
  • • Assisted with Steam deployment workflows, production coordination, release preparation, post-launch bug diagnosis, and rapid hotfix deployment.
  • • Produced promotional video content and advertisements for Galactic Thunderdome using Adobe Premiere and Illustrator.
  • • Designed and implemented gameplay audio systems and original sound assets using Adobe Audition, including dynamic spatial audio approximation systems for large-scale entity groups and environmental effects.
  • • Currently prototyping and iterating on smaller-scale gameplay concepts in preparation for the next production cycle.

ROAM

Freelance UI Developer

March 2025 – April 2025

ROAM is an AI-driven game creation platform enabling users to generate and customize games from natural language and image inputs.

  • • Built runtime UI in Unity's uGUI, layered on the Modern UI Pack and BetterUI component libraries, for ROAM's AI-driven application platform.
  • • Built a reflection-based generic data-entry system: reads a class instance's public fields and properties at runtime, generates the matching input widget per type (strings, integers, decimals, booleans, enums, Vector2/Vector3), and reconstructs the instance from the edited values.
  • • Built menu-sequence flows and DOTween-driven transitions for onboarding steps including genre selection.
  • • Modeled a 24-piece Blender primitive library with UV-separated, dual-texture-ready faces for the platform's procedural world generator.
  • • Authored 38 "Sprawl Module" city-block prefabs (skyscrapers, houses, ancient ruins, parks) with JSON descriptors, balancing density and complexity across the set.

Institut Supérieur d'Informatique

Course Instructor

May 2020 – February 2022

  • • Designed and taught courses in C# and Algorithms in both classroom and remote learning environments.
  • • Created all course materials including lectures, assignments, and examinations.
  • • Delivered remote instruction through Microsoft Teams during the COVID-19 pandemic while maintaining strong student engagement and outcomes.

Institut Supérieur d'Informatique

Freelance Technical Document Translator

February 2018 – October 2019

  • • Translated technical course materials from French to English across a wide range of subjects.
  • • Ensured accuracy, clarity, and terminological consistency in all translated material.

Projects

SquadJS — Server Management Plugin Suite

Open Source (MIT) — JavaScript / Node.js / Sequelize

July 2025 – Present — Running in production on live 100-player multiplayer servers

  • • Developed five event-driven plugins forming an integrated skill and team management system: TrueSkill-derived ratings, skill-aware team balancing, join-time player assignment, team-switch enforcement, and a shared services layer the other four are built on.
  • • Adapted a TrueSkill-derived rating system for Squad's 50v50 format, separating the internal skill estimate used for balancing from the conservative public rating shown on leaderboards, and weighting rating changes by how long a player was actually present in the round.
  • • Calibrated rating parameters through a two-pass grid search over 1,448 historical matches and 11,016 players, validated against actual outcomes. The favoured team wins roughly 90% of the time once the rating gap passes 0.5.
  • • Reduced blowout rounds by more than 15% against the server's own pre-suite baseline, with a corresponding rise in close games, removing the need for manual admin scrambles.
  • • Designed a persistence layer supporting SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL through Sequelize, with a versioned migration engine providing per-plugin migration groups, schema drift detection on mount, and a documented path for deployments whose database user holds no DDL grants.
  • • Implemented sub-2-second verified player assignment using force-polled player state to work around a 30-second RCON refresh limitation in the framework.
  • • Built a test suite running against real SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL instances rather than mocks, covering the service layer and all four consumer plugins.
  • • Consolidated three parallel implementations of clan detection, player tracking and persistence into a single shared service layer, and built Discord pipelines for operational feedback and administrative control by non-technical server staff.
  • • Adopted by at least six community servers that have made contact, two of them running the full suite with the game's native team-switching disabled.

donjoyce.ca — Bilingual Real Estate Site

HTML / CSS / Netlify

Launched September 2026

  • • Built and deployed a sixteen-page bilingual site totalling 1.4 MB including all images and both self-hosted fonts, with no framework, no build step and no executing JavaScript.
  • • Scored 99 mobile and 100 desktop on Lighthouse performance, with 100 across accessibility, best practices and SEO, and 0 ms total blocking time.
  • • Enforced script-src 'none' in the Content Security Policy as a design constraint rather than a hardening pass, so any future attempt to add a tracker or third-party dependency fails visibly instead of shipping silently.
  • • Audited every colour declaration against its background by hand after Lighthouse reported 95, finding three further WCAG AA failures the automated run structurally could not reach: two in :hover states and one on a page the crawl did not scan.
  • • Implemented JSON-LD structured data sitewide, and built parallel English and French page trees with French-language URLs and full hreflang coverage including x-default, so both languages index independently rather than through a translation widget.

Galactic Thunderdome

Unity / C# — Released October 23rd, 2024

Physics-based brawler emphasizing dynamic simulation, destructible environments, and real-time AI. Lead gameplay systems developer. See the Pansimula entry above for technical detail.

Educational Games for Legends of Learning

Unity / C#

  • • Malfunction (2019) — Math and science tower defense for grades 6-12.
  • • Grow Hop (2018) — 2D platformer for grades 2-4 teaching photosynthesis.
  • • Dance of Atoms (2017) — Chemistry puzzle game for grades 7-10.
  • • Bid for Life (2017) — Biology strategy game for grades 9-11.

Skills

Programming Languages

C# (12+ years), JavaScript, HLSL / Compute Shaders, SQL (SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL — schema design, versioned migrations, WAL, concurrency patterns, cross-dialect portability)

Software Development

Real-time systems architecture, Profiling-driven optimization and debugging, Runtime and memory-conscious engineering, Algorithmic complexity and data structures, Object pooling and staged initialization systems, Physics optimization for gameplay systems, Gameplay AI and pathfinding systems, Event-driven architecture, Database-backed state management and persistence, Open-source development (MIT-licensed public repositories)

Backend & Data

Event-driven architecture, Database-backed state and persistence, Sequelize across SQLite / MySQL / PostgreSQL, Versioned migration engines with schema drift detection, TrueSkill-derived rating systems and parameter calibration by grid search, Automated testing against real database engines, RCON and real-time server integration, Internationalization

Web

Static site architecture, Semantic HTML and responsive CSS, WCAG accessibility auditing including states automated tools do not measure, Structured data (Schema.org / JSON-LD), Technical SEO and multilingual hreflang, Content Security Policy and HTTP security headers, Cache strategy and edge configuration

Game Development

Unity (12+ years), Unity Profiler (CPU, GPU, memory, physics), Unity uGUI, Gameplay systems engineering, Simulation-heavy gameplay architecture, Procedural and quasi-procedural systems, AI behavior systems, Runtime UI generation, Technical prototyping and iteration workflows

AI-Assisted Development

Daily agentic workflows in Claude Code and Cline (VSCode) on production codebases, Ongoing evaluation of Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and other models against real engineering tasks, Model selection driven by cost-to-capability rather than defaulting to the frontier

Tools & Technologies

Git / GitHub, Visual Studio / VSCode, Node.js, Sequelize, Docker, Discord API, Netlify, Astro, Jira, Adobe Audition, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Illustrator

Languages

English — fluent (spoken and written), French — fluent (spoken), basic (written)

Additional Strengths

Technical mentoring and instruction, Cross-disciplinary collaboration, Production problem-solving, Runtime debugging and issue diagnosis, Rapid prototyping balanced with production-focused optimization, Small-team technical leadership and coordination