Sebastiano Mandalà

With a bunch of my colleagues and friends, we decided to leave Climax and start a new company called Freejam. With the same passion of 10 years ago, but much more experience, I am excited to jump in this (ad)venture with both feet!
We advocate the Lean Startup principles and the first public MVPs of our game will be out very soon!

GPI (www.gameprog.it) is a well known game development site and no-profit association in Italy.
the site mission is mainly to help wannabes to become professional developers and placing a bridge between academic/government institutions, international companies/institutions and Italian game development teams.

As part of the staff I do community management, organize events/contest and keeping relationship with 3rd party entities.

I am really excited to work on a new web based Unity3D social game at Climax.

I have been the lead of a 5 engineers team for a new Unity3D online game not yet disclosed to the public. I developed the game framework from the scratch as well the client/server architecture, ensuring the maintainability of the project over the time. Thanks to the agility of the production, I am also part of the day to day decision making processes. I am responsible of the whole client and services development, plus directly involved on the server side and administration tools development.

In Climax I have been having the chance to work on several projects developed for several platforms.

My support was fundamental to complete "Gormiti DS" and "Eyepet and friends" titles.

I also exploited my Graphic Programmer skills to develop a special GPU based particle FX to be used on a yet to be announced IP-based AAA multi-platform title built with Unreal 3 Engine.

The platform I have worked on are: PS3, XBOX 360, DS, PSVITA, PC

Arooga is a Climax sister company.

I was involved in a new company project, developing from the scratch the Facebook Social Game "Club Paradise".
My main task was to create the Adobe Flash based client framework architecture, as well as to plan the initial development phase.

Thanks to this experience I have got a full understanding of the social game mechanisms.

I worked as Game Director and Technical Architect for the Rainbow Adobe Flash based Social Massive Multiplayer Online Game for kids, Winx Club: the online game (http://www.winxclub.com).
Rainbow (http://www.rbw.it) is a worldwide famous IP licensor.

I aided the company to create and lead a new game development department based in Italy and in Singapore.
Under my direction the game has been developed and published in one year, using cutting edge flash technology available at that time.
The result was very warmed welcomed by the targeted audience.

Overall this experience has been great to understand how a multinational company works.

Here I had a great time as game developer. I worked in a medium-size team (40+) on a triple A Massive Multiplayer Online Game (www.tcos.com). I had the chance to learn new technologies, update my D3D and HLSL knowledge and learn Unreal 2.5 engine.

I was co-responsible of the optimization and tuning of the Unreal engine rendering pipeline, but I also worked on the server side path finding architecture to handle hundreds of NPCs.

An old article I wrote for the game fans: http://my.mmosite.com/8b47361e891af6ab2110b7fce934071c/blog/item/fafe6f8632946430ba444bc4ba4b0eee.html

Founder and ex-owner of 7thSense s.r.l. (http://www.7thsensestudios.com), an official Nintendo team developer.
In 2002 the team grew up to 12 members, both Italians and foreigners.

Among the titles developed, there are: "The Fish Files", our first original game shown in second position at ELSPA chart in April 2004, "The New Addams Family Series", "Phantom - the ghost who walks", "Mandrake - The Shadow of the Vehme" and "Paperboy / Rampage" for GBA.
I also developed a 3D demo shown at ATI booth during the E3 2002.

Overall it was a quite important achievement for a video game company based in Sicily.

I worked as 3D Programmer involved on R&D at the Center for Advanced Studies, R&D in Sardinia (http://www.crs4.it). CRS4 bought the license to use the 3D engine I created at that time.