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Peter Cardwell-Gardner

Welcome to my site. I write sporadically about Unity, Rust and technical leadership.

About

As a Game Developer, I've worked with games and creative technology for over a decade.

I guide teams through the entire development life cycle, specialising in architecture, gameplay & game feel, tooling, UX, UI, audio and devops (VCS/CI).

My strength is deep domain knowledge backed by empathy and pragmatism - technology problems are best solved by understanding people problems first.

Living in London, UK.

Games

I've shipped titles across PC, Console, Mobile & VR for both original and licensed IP. (TerraTech, Peppa Pig, Stratego, etc)

I've also worked on numerous non-game projects for the likes of Google (Horizons VR) and household brands (Adidas, Vodafone, etc). I often find myself on the bleeding edge of new platforms and hardware - e.g. helping solve the mental health crisis with clinically verified VR therapy (Oxford VR).

These personal projects remain close to my heart:

Cadence

Cadence is my love letter to things that interest me: games, music and programming.

A crossover of game and music app, players use the game's rules and logic to make music. Understanding how to bring these two worlds together took 8 years of tinkering, and the relentless zeal to build a great user experience.

Despite outlasting its intended life span, my architectural decisions have weathered reasonably. I'm also proud of the significant engineering challenges I've solved along the way (two examples: a graph based combinational logic runtime and a real time audio synthesis engine).

Error Prone

Featured in Wired and the BBC, Error Prone is a jam game built in 12 hours. It teaches us how autonomous vehicles have the potential to be safer than their human counterparts.

Open Source

Unity FSM

A wildly popular state machine library for Unity.

Idiomatic and opinionated, meticulous care has been paid to the "user experience" and reliability. One of my most successful pieces of code, it has in the past solicited applications for my employers and earned me an occasional drink at conferences.

LibPDIntegration

I was pleased to be able to contribute an iOS port for LibPDIngtegration, allowing people to publish their puredata based Unity projects to iOS.

Other Works

Bits that don't fit anywhere else:

Super Friendship Arcade

An experimental video games showcase/party responsible for fostering new developers and cultivating a community of fans in Cape Town, South Africa. Whilst I'm no longer actively involved, I'm incredibly proud to see the event I co-founded become a cultural landmark.

#InnerSpace

A hobby web-comic series poking fun at the human condition - on Instagram

Writing

My non-technical essays about connection and creativity - on Medium