Rutul Thakkar

Android Developer

Android Developer Intern

Role: Programmer | UI Designer | Tester

Description:

Android Developer Intern

Role: Team Leader | Programmer | UI Designer | Tester

Description:

Spellcasters VR Game for Physical Therapy [Serious Games]

Link to Game: (Windows 64 exe - supports Oculus Rift / Rift 2 / Quest 2 with link cable / HTC Vive) Itch.io Page

Role: Lead Researcher, Creative Director, Design Integration Director, Scrum Master, Perforce and JIRA Admin, Backend Database Developer

Advisors: Jared Duval, Michael John, Elin Carstensdottir, Magy Seif El-Nasr, 11 Physical Therapists, 4 Occupational Therapists, 1 Neurologist, 1 VR Industry Mentor

Description:

• Leading a Research through Design approach with team of 10 consisting of researchers, developers, animators and artists
• Conducted interviews with 14 clinicians including Physical Therapists and Occupational Therapists to evaluate the efficacy of the game
• Worked on creating sample data visualization for companion app
• Co-Author of an research paper submitted for review to ASSETS 2021
• Conducted research during Fall of 2020 using a mixed method to assess what metrics are essential for tracking patient’s progress and how those can be visualized for the physical therapists
• Analyzed several interviews and designed a codebook along with a collection of visualizations for assessing its effectiveness
• Conducting regular daily meetings with development team using scrum methodology
• Collaborating and coordinating with faculty, fellow graduate students and subject matter experts
• Leading an adaptive design and documentation process
• Running virtual playtests with students and professionals from the industry over Zoom
• Designed and developed a MS SQL database and Node.JS backend with cloud development

Icelandic Language Learning Game [Serious Games]

Link to APK: Download

Role: Researcher, Gameplay Programmer, Game Designer

Description:

I was part of a team of 6 who worked with actual industry stakeholders to come up with a fun and engaging game to teach Icelandic children aged 6 to 8 years old, how to read and write simple letters and words in Icelandic. The children are able to speak and express themselves in Icelandic, but do not have basic reading and writing skills. Icelandic language is on the verge of extincting as it is not well used in modern day technology and media. The Icelandic government is working hard to preserve the language in various ways and we hope to help contribute to this cause by having made this prototype game.

My contributions

• Developed an Android mobile serious game prototype in 4 weeks in a team of 6 using Unity in 2D
• Collaborated and coordinated with the team on a daily basis
• Performed research and conducted interviews with external stakeholder
• Design and implemented tracing of Icelandic alphabets using touch and Line Renderer
• Design and implemented drag and drop on touch for item matching

Flu Prevention [Serious Games]

Link to Game: Download | Play Online: Play Now!

Description:

We were a team of 4 who created a small educational game with the aim to raise awareness of flu and encourage the use of masks against flu infection. The game teaches players the functions of three main medical items: the disinfecting liquid that kills the flu virus, the mask that prevents flu virus from transmitting into your body through the air for a certain amount of time while the mask is on, and medicine that can treat flu infection. Flu is a disease that has become a major health issue this year in 2020 due to the coronavirus outbreak in China with more than 95000 people affected as of March 2020 worldwide.

In the game you as the player are battling with a flu. You need to take action and there is no time to rest. Virus molecules are coming to attack you. You can attack them by throwing disinfectant liquid to stop and kill them or you can choose to wear a mask to resist their attacks for a few seconds. You can also take medicine to heal yourself if you are feeling weak. If you want to take medicine you need to remove your mask! Get ready to fight !

My contributions

• I worked on creating basic stucture for the project by implementing a game manager and some basic mechanics like managing the medicine mechanic
• Implemented various input detection and UI elements

Turtle Crossing [Serious Games]

Link to Game: Download

Description:

We are a team of 6 who created a small educational game that aim to educate the player on the environmental aspects of waste disposal, to teach them correct ways to dispose of certain kinds of waste, and to alert them about the effects of certain systemic issues that can impact our individual abilities to recycle [e.g. National sword].

The player is tasked with quickly dragging waste of certain types to its appropriate bin. For example, apple cores go to the compost, soda can go to metal recycling, and cigarette butts go to the regular trash can. Depending on the speed and accuracy of the player’s ability to sort the waste, more or less debris will appear on a shoreline, impeding baby turtles’ path toward the ocean. The better you sort, the fewer turtles need to die.

A short time after beginning the game, the player will be alerted to new overseas legislation that prohibits the amount of recycling that can actually be done. Once this happens, plastic and paper recyclables dragged to their appropriate bins are bounced out into the garbage bin, rendering any actual effort sorting useless. This is reflective of the real-world recycling crisis currently happening as a result of China’s National Sword act, which is essentially a ban on importing most paper and plastic materials from other countries. Now, most of what is being pushed through the recycling process is not being recycled.

My contributions

• I worked on implementing the spawning of trash on the center of the screen with a timer and also created the bin UI on the top
• I also worked on drag and drop of the trash onto the bins and checking if the right bin has been selected or not. Which decided how many debris would spawn on the beach by the wave. The debris hurt and kill the turtles

Hovercraft driving game

Link to Game: Download

Description:

The game uses follow camera to keep track of the hovercraft as it moves around the mountain terrain. The objective is to collect all good objects and avoid all bad one. They are indicated with different colors. The hovercraft hovers at a set altitude and the player is able to move and turn the hovercraft. There is a finish line and a confetti particle effect when player collects all good objects and goes past the finish line. The hovercraft also has a thrust particle effect. The game has sound effects too and uses a sound manager that i implemented with singleton pattern. I created the all the assets for this game.

Dungeon Crawler game

Link to Game: Download

Description:

The game was created in 2D format. It uses external assets. I implemented 2D sprite animations, object collection using player movement and collision detection and spawn prefab objects at run time. The player faces a set of hurdles such as fire and enemies which he or she has to avoid. The player can plant bombs to kill the enemies.

Political Election Spreadsheet Game

Link to Game: Download

Description:

It is a turned based game with the objective of managing your money and winning majority votes from 26 states before your opponent gets there. Players can use different media tactics such as Speech and Social Media based on your party strengths and targeted states to acquire more support of the population in a given state. I was involved in the designing of the user form UI and backend programming of the game. I imported data from excel sheets into collections and dictionary for manipulation. The game uses classes to structure the data and hold it in its objects.

Breakout

Link to Code: View Code | Link to executable: Download

Features: Basic Breakout gameplay. Uses SFML for graphics. Game includes textures for brick and sound effects. Implemented both keyboard and mouse controls. There are different types of bricks: bricks that can be destoryed with one hit, with two hits and with three hits. Each this the ball hits a brick that has more than one hit required to break it, the brick texture changes accordingly. There are special bricks that increase ball speed and which increases paddle width. There are two levels and 3 lives, each time ball falls down you lose a life. Once both levels are cleared the game returns to first level with existing ball speed.

Pong

Link to Code: View Code Link to executable: Download

Features: Basic Pong gameplay. Uses SFML for graphics. Game includes user vs user mode, AI vs AI mode and AI vs user mode. It has texture for background and sound effects. Implemented for keyboard controls. Use spacebar to reset the game. First player to score 5 wins the game.

Connect Four

Link to Code: View Code | Link to executable: Download

Features: Basic Connect Four gameplay + additional mods such as variable size array and required number of pieces to win, ability to remove along with to add a piece and checking for winning conditions with wrap mode (edge columns are merged to check if win is possible)

Flappy Bird Clone

Link to Game: Download

Features: Basic Flappy Bird gameplay features. Learned the following concepts: Singleton Pattern, object pooling, scrolling background.

Hangman

Link to Game: Download

Description:

We implemented the game for different categories of words which user can choose at the beginning from the given menu. My teammate also applied some simple graphics using “graphics.h” library. The game stores and retrieves data from different files based on user input.

Features: Select Category of words, GamePlay, View Highscore, View Game Instructions, View Credits

FavDish

Description:

• Consumed json REST API response to store locally in room database and displaying data in recycler view with custom adapter using Kotlin and MVVM architecture.
• Quickly learned Kotlin and newer Android components including MVVM, room and RxJava to design and implement create read update and delete (CRUD) operations with random dish generation and favorite bookmarking feature

Trip Amigo

Description:

• Collaborated and led a team of 9 through software development life cycle of a trip itinerary generator Android application over 4 months using scrum methodology
• Led design discussions, gathered and documented functional requirements from stakeholder
• Designed database and app UI implementation using XML, SQLite and Java
• Consumed json responses from various REST APIs for destination, flight, hotel and restaurant information
• Designed and implemented persistent storage of generated itinerary for future edits

Twitter Tag

APK & Code: Link

Description:

• Consumed Twitter4J json REST API response and populated the data into a recycler view with custom adapter and layout view along with local storage of fetched data for offline access using Java, shared preferences and file serialization

Android Launcher App

APK & Code: Link

Description:

• Led end to end development process of an Android App based on client requirements in 8 weeks
• Prioritized and managed the distribution of development tasks with fellow developers

University of California Santa Cruz

GPA: 4.0 / 4.0

Stevens Institute of Technology

GPA: 3.22 / 4.0 - dropped due to lack of desired course offerings