About me

My name is Matias Szylkowski, born in Montevideo, Uruguay in November 1997. I became interested in software development in 2008 when I created my first game with Microsoft Power Point, a labyrinth game controlled with the mouse. After that, I resorted to the Scratch visual programming language to learn how code works and used StencylWorks to develop my first Flash games. Around 2011 I became familiar with Python, and since then I have learned many other languages as well.

Education

Studying Computer Science in the Georgia Institute of Technology with expected graduation term fall 2019.

Graduated from Escuela Integral in December 2015 with an International Baccalaureate degree. Placed #1 in the class ranking out of 73 students.

Interests

During the past years I have been doing game development in order to improve my coding skills. Alongside, I have introduced in my projects various other fields of programming, such as writing algorithms to solve mathematical problems, design the user interface, and developing artificially intelligent players that compete against humans and mimic their behaviors. Eventually I would like to learn how to work with robots as well instead of coding purely virtual objects.

I am also very interested in how people perceive and interact with technology. Being software a central part of today’s interactions, I always try to refine the UI and UX of my projects to please the users and make the app look more polished. Virtual Reality is becoming a new form of interaction with virtual worlds, and allows for much richer experiences than conventional screens, which I also find particularly interesting.

Developing Android apps has gained my interest in the past years as I was learning how to do so, and not only do I like reading about new achievements in the software industry, but also technology in general.

Skills & projects

Python / Blender Game Engine

Started coding in Python at the age of 13 from Codecademy, and used this language to code a First Person Shooter (and other game prototypes) in the Blender 3D game engine an year later. I have also used Python for solving many math problems and automating tasks.

Java / Android

I learned Java almost three years ago, and it is now my go-to language to test code. I started my first big Java project in 2014, TwentyFour, an Android math game about operating with the numbers on the screen to get to 24. The game is now published on Google Play Store. I also interned last spring for 4 months as an Android developer at Scanntech, a company that provides retail stores with Point of Sale solutions with the same capabilities as the big chains’ software. During my internship, I had the opportunity to work on a big project with other experienced developers.

C# / Unity 3D

I have done two projects with Unity. The first one was a Bumper Cars AI that eventually evolved to be a game prototype. The cars only have the positions of the other cars related to their local axis and some raycast sensors in order to find out the best behavior (crash forward, turn around, avoid crash, get more distance, orientate). The second project is Robot Test, a puzzle game for touch screen devices with a 7×10 board and robots that interact with the blocks placed on the grid, in order to get to the target positions. The game has more than 20 blocks with unique behaviors and 60+ levels, but is still in Alpha version.

Lua / Corona SDK

I learned this programming language as a way to create 2D games using Corona SDK, which is a very powerful game development tool in Lua. I created the game You Will Crash, currently available on Google Play Store. It is an endless casual game where the player has to avoid crashing into the obstacles. There are many of them, with different behaviors. Collecting dots allows players to buy boosters and survive longer, while increasing their high score.

Other languages and programming tools

During my internship at Scanntech, I worked with SQLite3 to manage all sorts of databases. The main program was an Android application written in Java and XML, and the development was done in a Linux machine with IntelliJ IDEA and Maven compiler. The ADB was used to debug the application on the rooted devices. Version management was done using Git, and all the tasks were managed through JIRA (Atlassian’s issue tracker).

Besides, I have some basic Web Dev skills with HTML, and am learning C++ at the moment.

3D modelling / texturing / animating

Through Blender 3D i have acquired these skills as a way to improve school projects by adding short videos. When I realised I wanted to make 3D games, I started making the assets in Blender and following tutorials that I found online in order to improve the graphics of my projects. For my last project Robot Test, all the assets were created by myself using 3D sofware, and the same happened with the Bumper Cars AI assets. Some of my renders can be found here.

2D vector drawing

To make the assets for my 2D games I have learned how to use Inkscape to create 2D UI elements and other components. You Will Crash has assets made in Inkscape, as well as TwentyFour.

Goals

• Experiment with machine learning and neural networks through simple projects (for now).
• Learn Web Dev (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) to make hybrid mobile apps.
• Expand my programming experience by using new tools and languages.
• Work with robots / interactive devices. Could be related to internet of things or artificial intelligence.