Games
Legend of Zelda:
Unity Remaster
Recreation of the first dungeon from the Legend of Zelda for NES. Elements from the original game were accurately recreated and implemented including collectables, comabt, weapons, enemies and movement. This game was my first introduction to working in unity. Development took place over a 3-week period while working with a partner. Through this project I was able to gain familiarity with different unity skills such as UI creation, coroutines and compositional code structure. Among my main contributions to this project are movement/collisions, enemy AI, scene transitions, and the additional boss fight level.
Project Dragonheart
Project Dragonheart is an in-development game developed in Unity that I am working on within WolverineSoft studio. Project Dragonheart is a city-builder game where ​the player must explore dungeons and collect resources as they build up and upgrade their city. Among my contributions to the project are a system for environmental effects and random events throughout gameplay.
Windy Wizard
Game created in unity over a 6 week period in a team of 4 people. Throughout this project I was able to get a good grasp of the development cycle of a video game including playtesting, iterating on feedback, making developer log posts, creating marketing materials and meeting project deadlines. Among my contributions to this game are visuals/animation, combat mechanics, level design and interactable objects.
​
BuildyBall
Rapid game prototype created in Unity. Working solo over a 2-week period I created this puzzle-platformer game. Through this project I was able to experiment with the creative choices of game development like gameplay mechanics and level design. During the development process I received playtest feedback which I used to iterate on my design to ensure the best end-product possible in my development timeframe.
​
Non-Game Projects
2D Game Engine
Currently working on 2d Game Engine implemented with c++. Engine works with windows, macOS and Linux. Engine currently supports custom actor templates, custom components with Lua, multiple scenes, customizable visual/audio/fonts and rendering configuration. Actors can be created and destroyed at runtime, and can be given overrides for properties in actor template or any of its components.
Search Engine
In a team of 3 people, create an inverted index of a crawled sample of wikipedia articles. Search engine uses a combination of TF-IDF and Pagerank to provide relevant results to the user. Project contains a index server that hosts the inverted index, and a search server that interacts with the index server via a REST API and displays results whenver the users submit queries.
Instagram style Social Media site
Website that contains basic social media functionality such as creating and deleting accounts, posts, comments, and likes. Python project created in a group of 3 people. Database created using SQLite, serverside dynamic page functionality including REST API implemented with Flask, and clientside dynamic page functionality implemented with React. Website tested and deployed to and AWS EC2 instance to ensure functionality. Project available upon request.
MapReduce Framework
Implementation of a MapReduce framework inspired by Google's original MapReduce paper. This python project was created in a group of 3 people over a 2 week period. Multithreaded program that hosts a manager and a user-specified number of workers capable of communicating over the network. Project is capable of processing scalably large amounts of data via a distributed system. Project is built with fault-tolerance in mind to ensure successful completion of tasks in the event of a failure on any of the workers.
Experience
Programming Language Experience
C, C++, C#, Python, Rust, JavaScript, Lua and OCaml
Game Development Classes
Introduction to Video Game Development,
Video Games and Learning,
Computing for Creative Expression,
Game Engine Architecture
Skills
Unity, Snap!, Jira, Git, Flask, React, AWS-EC2, SDL2
and SQLite
About Me
My name is Miles Ortolan
I'm a Computer Science senior at the University of Michigan. Throughout my time in university I have worked on many projects to gain a solid understanding of a wide variety computer science and software development principles. Through this process I have gained a passion for software development and particularly video game development.
In my personal life I enjoy spending quality time with the people around me, and have spent the past three years in group housing where I strive to play an active role building a sense of community for me and my housemates.
