Hi, my name is Alexandre Brochu and I am a computer programmer that has been interested in computer science for a long time. I was also interested in the game programming domain for 8 years. I started studying computer programming from high school through to University. In high school and cegep, I practiced writing code and learnt about good conding standards. When I studied in university at the Sherbrooke University, there was a bigger emphasis on more abstract ideas about computer science and different algorithms to solve problems encountered in multiple domains of computer programming.
First Contact
My first contact with computer programming happened early in my life. When I was studying basic maths operations in grade school, my father wrote a simple program to validate my answers automatically. I found this interested but I was too young to really get into it then.
After this, when I was about 10 years old, I asked my father to teach me some simple languages so I could write programs myself. When I used those tools to create some programs, I began being more and more interested at the way languages worked behind the scenes. This desire to understand pushed me to find out about a school that had a special computer program.
With my introduction to computer programming done, I went on to cegep to learn more and practice writing code in multiple situiations with good coding standards. There I learnt a lot about databases, connecting a program to a database and web applications. At that point I knew I want to work in computer programming but I had yet to find the domain I was the most interested in.
Gaming and University
Then I realised that one of my favorite hobby involved an important computer science and computer programming: video games. I started playing video games early and when I realised a lot of programming efforts went in the production of this media I wanted to know more about this creation process. After I learnt more about game creation, I knew this domain of computer programming was the one that interested me the most. From that point on, I worked on simple games to learn the specific ways of game programming.
While I was studying in university, I chose to pick the most courses that could relate in a way to game programming. Since there was a program that specialised in 3D rendering, I did a lot of courses about different ways to approch computer rendering and animation.
After finishing my studies at Sherbrooke University, I worked on some of my personal projects while searching for a job in the game development domain.
Game Development Career
Not too long after looking for a job in game development, I got the opportunity to start working for a game company located in Ottawa, Ontario. The company was called Fuel Industries and I was hired as a gameplay programmer to start working on mobile projects.
I was able to start working on a project in the beginning stages and I stayed in the team until first release. I got to work very closely with the 3D artists and animators since these were involved in the main gameplay aspects of the game. I was working for them for 1 year and then I started to look for some other challenges.
I succeeded to have a chance at working in the Montréal scene when I was hired at Behaviour Interactive. It started in a very similar way with some mobile projects moslty. After some work and with new experience gained, I moved onto some different style of projects (Steam, PC, Stadia platforms). I got to work a lot with tools like Unity3D at first and then I moved onto working mostly with Unreal Engine 4. I also got the chance to work with some in-house made engines from clients.
New Interests
These days, I am still working in game development and I enjoy it every day still. I have my own personal projects going on in parallel with the ones I work with on my day job. Some of these are described in more details on the main page of this portfolio.
Lately, I did notice that I development some interest in a new aspect of programming. I started looking into graphics programming and learned how to use some of the popular graphics API like DirectX 11 and Vulkan. I really enjoy working on some programming projects where I know I will have some visual feedback for the work I put in. I also like working on some code that should run in real-time which makes graphics programming perfect for my taste.
Some of my graphics oriented projects can also be found on my portfolio. I know that I am starting out in this domain but I will keep working on it and get better to slowly move onto working on more complicated ideas.
Contact me
All me contact information can be found at the bottom of this page (email address, Github, Linkedin).
Curriculum Vitae
Here are some links to my curriculum vitae I wrote using an AwesomeCV fork from a LateX GitHub project.