Sharan Shodhan
Game Developer / iOS Application Developer / Software Engineer
Hello! I am a passionate Game Developer currently working at Tonk Tonk Games. I made my first game prototype ten years ago and since then have worked on dozens of games on multiple platforms. Through the eight years of my professional software development experience, I have gained expertise in cross-platform mobile games as well as application development on iOS and Web platforms.
As an undergraduate, I joined Playpower, an organization making Math educational games and backed by a research team at Carnegie Mellon University. I started as a programming intern, but in a few years, I had become the lead developer of a ten-person team. Today, the games that make me most proud are Math Pop and Math Planet. Downloaded over a million times, the games have won the National STEM Game Competition, the NYC Schools Gap App Challenge, and a reader’s choice award.
After spending almost four years with the amazing team at Playpower, I co-founded a company called Dekorate. As co-founder and CTO, my role was to make an elegant interior designing service accessible to anyone with a smartphone. Along with enhancing my app development skills, I acquired good leadership skills by managing interdisciplinary teams. Leaving the company in the able hands of my colleague, I was ready to take on the next challenge and applied for a graduate program at the Entertainment Technology Center.
I was always interested in the confluence of entertainment and education. With a mission to make learning fun and engaging for kids all around the world, I joined Teal Labs - a small team of engineers and scientists aiming to build a 21st-century learning system that is highly effective. There I leveraged technologies like augmented reality and multiplayer gaming to build highly engaging experiences that make the students fall in love with learning.
I then pursued graduate studies at the ETC. As part of my coursework in Building Virtual Worlds, I was responsible for rapidly prototyping interactive games using Unity (C#) every two weeks in interdisciplinary teams of four or five. Working on cutting-edge technologies such as Oculus Rift, Leap Motion, HTC Vive, and Cozmo Robots had expanded my technical knowledge in the Virtual Reality and robotics space as well.
Right after graduation, I joined the amazing team at Tangible Play (Osmo) and very quickly went on to lead engineering to release three games within a span of ten months. Through this experience, I honed my Unity skills as well as management skills. I worked on some of the latest features at the time - Timelines, Asset Bundles, and Cinemachine. I also worked on streamlining the art pipeline by writing tools that would help bring in custom Spine animations into Unity.
I am currently working at Tonk Tonk Games as an Engineering Lead and leading the Unity side efforts for our games uFighter and uDancer. Along with gameplay and UI features in the game, I also help write tools and plugins to make our art and animation pipeline simpler for the artists on the team.
Apart from making games and applications, I enjoy playing tennis, traveling, and exploring new places!
