Mark Kouris

Rendering Engineer | Unity Developer | Passionate Game Dev

This ever-growing website works as a portfolio for my best work in the realm of programming and game development. Even after 6 years, both academically and professionally, I am still eager to keep learning and growing as a developer. I hope you enjoy your stay in my little corner of the internet, and please reach out to me if you have any inquiries or employment opportunities!

Contact:

Email:

kourismark@gmail.com

Linkedin:

linkedin.com/in/markkouris

Github:

https://github.com/MarkKouris

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Muddy Robot

Currently, I am a volunteer at Muddy Robot Games, working as a graphics programmer for their upcoming Unity-based mobile game.

As the game is unannounced, I cannot show visuals from it, but I have been working on water shaders and effects in collaboration with the art team.

Shelljump

I was brought on to work on Shelljumps flagship title "Inpulse" as an independent contractor. 

My tasks for Inpulse were mainly as a systems programmer. Some of what I did are as follows:

PROJECTS:

PROJECT REDOUBT:

Project Redoubt was my junior year game project at DigiPen. For this project, I wore many hats on the development team, making sure everything went smoothly. Here are some highlights on what I worked on that I am most proud of:

Below you can see the lava shader in action:

And a full gameplay demo:

Ransack Raccoon

Ransack Raccoon was a project I joined half way through development. What they needed was an experienced graphics programmer to rewrite their existing OpenGL rendering pipeline as it wasn't made to be as versatile and scalable as they needed. Utilizing my deep understanding of not only graphics programing, but of game engine design, I was able to fully rewrite it to their desired specifications while maintaining the existing interface utilized in adjacent systems. My next task was to develop a shader (which you can see below) to highlight gameplay elements in accordance to the requirements from both the art and design team. 

Please check out the game on steam!

Above: An isolated demo of the outline shader in action.

Below: an example of the outline shader in game, notifying the player they still have items to collect.

HIP HOPPITY:

Hip Hoppity is a 2D auto running platformer with musical inspiration and elements that I worked on as part of an 11 person team during my sophmore year at DigiPen. My role on the team was as lead graphics and systems programmer. Some of my contributions are as follows:

Below: a snippet taken from the Digipen game showcase of Hip Hoppity.

OpenGl Rendering Engine

Below you will see 2 visual demos for the OpenGL rendering engine I developed, beginning with the course I took in advanced graphics at DigiPen, which I then iterated upon more in my own time. These classes taught me all about the implementation techniques of the more advanced techniques with opengl, including reflections, different methods of lighting including phong and blinn, deferred rendering, forward rendering, and skyboxes. The following are some visual demos from the projects I have made for the class. Each project builds off of the previous in an engine we made from scratch.

Object and Camera movement Demo:

Reflections and Skybox Demo:

CS 388: Nintendo Switch Development

With this class, I was able to work hands on with the Nintendo Switch codebase and develop my own projects that all ran locally on the Nintendo Switch. Due to my NDA I am unable to go more in-depth with specifics of said code base, but it was a fantastic experience developing on a new platform. Our final project was a short game named Marbleu, which you can watch our demo of below. Sound, graphics, motion controls, input detection and a physics engine are all present.

During the project, I:

Marbleu Gameplay Demo:

Education:

DigiPen Institute of Technology, Redmond, WA (2023)