Greetings Citizens,

On last week’s Wingman’s Hangar you met Joshua Alway, a Cloud Imperium programmer responsible for helping add some of the ‘pew pew’ to our weapons. Here’s his Comm-Link profile:

How did you get started in the game industry?

I’ve wanted to be a programmer since middle school, with a preference towards working with video games. I started learning C++ by the time I entered highschool, and was doing some 3D DirectX programming by the time I graduated. After that, I went to Rochester Institute of Technology for their Game Design and Development undergrad program, also finishing a minor in CS.

What projects have you worked on?

While this is my first major industry job, I had some other minor programming positions during my time at university. I did some part-time work for a professor’s research project, in which we created a mod in Unreal for studies into whether video games could be used as a treatment for Amblyopia (lazy eye). I then did some work over a summer for the arcade game company, ICE.

What are you doing for Cloud Imperium?

My job at Cloud Imperium is primarily to create the basic effects for artists and gameplay programmers to manipulate. This means I spend most of my time writing shaders and the engine code feeding data into them. For example, I worked on the shader we currently use for creating our laserbolt effects, as well as several others which won’t be seen until later on.

What are you most excited to see in Star Citizen/Squadron 42?

I am quite excited to see what the end results of the economic and related simulation systems will be. Dogfighting and such is fine, but I’m more interested in the universe itself.

What are you playing right now?

Currently, I play a lot of Battlefield 4, intermixed with an assortment of indie titles, and an occasional round of the Touhou bullet hell series.