Thomas Tidy

Bio

Hi, my name's Thomas and I'm working to make making games my livelihood. I have a strong passion passion for making games, especially ones that build connections. I've grown up playing co-op games with my brothers from lego star wars to borderlands and want the opportunity to create something that builds bonds like those games did for me. There's a lot a game can say and space for a lot of people to help say it, meaning, I love collaborating with others and want nothing more than to have as many people's voices be heard while creating something impactful.

I am a professional programmer & game designer based in South Australia. I've done my own projects and collaborated to work on others. I have strong technical skills in C++ & blueprints but more prevelantly I am a quick adaptive learner who is always prepared for a new challenge. I have started my own business in contracting out my skills while always actively looking at more business avenues.

I am driven, with a resilience that has allowed me to overcome every hurdle I have encountered because getting stuck is just an opportunity to learn and grow to escape my limitations. I spend my off time doing other creative endeavours like writing, making a card game and keeping up with gaming news. I just love creating with an unending drive to always find a way to create.

My goal is to make games the core of my professional career. Whether that's creating stuff with people around me or helping others make their stuff, I just appreciate the opportunity to express my creativity and do so collaboratively.

If any of that sounds good to you, feel free to email me at: thomastidy@dynamake.com.au

Projects

All Out Fight

May 2026 - Current

Project director
Lead Programmer
Lead Designer

Project highlights:

Iterating on a pre-built lag compensation system to incorporate game specfic interactions like melee attacks, projectiles and blocks creating a smoother network experience in lower quality network environments.

Designing a project architecture built for extension and long term development. There are many classes and sub classes in the game with overlapping functionality making it necessary to build for scaling.

Focusing on player feedback with effects conveying player state.

Blockade

October 2023 - October 2024

Project director
Lead programmer
Lead designer

Project highlights:

Architecting the game through GAS (Gameplay ability system) so that all combat, building, movement and inventory operations would flow through the system at some point during the game. Taking advantage of ability tasks for ticking, attribute sets for stats like health and power, effects for damage and status effects and application requirements for preventing friendly fire.

Creating complex AI with decision making based off the stimulants from the AI perception system. Applying an algorithm that values stimulants like sight and sound and plugs them into an operation in combination with other conditions such as distance and previous target to generate a value which is compared to the previous highest value to determine it's target.

Developing an in-game build system to accommodate for complex environments and terrain. Orienting towers based off surface normals and offsetting preview buildings to point to their base calculated from actor bounds.

Subclassing the character movement component to introduce customised movement capabilities that function in high latency environments. Adding networked coyote time, gravity curve, strafing and sprinting by creating custom bit flags as well as a custom FCharacterNetworkMoveData for additional data.

Organise My Bags

October 2024 - October 2025

Project director
Lead programmer
Lead designer

Itch.io link: https://officialdynamake.itch.io/organise-my-goods

Project highlights:

Integrating gameplay with user interfaces involved the process of testing the limits of UMG, widget interaction and the interplay of the two. As well as retaining the one way dependency design of UI to internal systems per best practice.

Utilising a Samsung galaxy A05s low spec android phone as a testing device to ensure widest accessibility and reaching a performance improvement of 15-20 FPS to 27-30 FPS by using Unreal insights and process of elimination to discover the expensive operations of mobile HDR and occlusion culling.

Recreating the prediction key system from GAS (Gameplay ability system) to introduce client-side prediction for inventory operations that utilise FFastArraySerializer to potentially reduce network load.

Skills

Experienced with Unreal engine's GAS (Gameplay Ability System), Character Movement Component, Fast TArray Replication, AI Perception and UMG in Unreal engine
Proficient with C++, C# and Blueprints
Experienced with Network multiplayer