Meet the Team: Matt Mechtley

Heya folks, I’m Matt Mechtley, programmer and resident maths go-to guy here at Flashbang! I program a little bit of everything, but I usually tend to end up doing game systems (like Jetpack Brontosaurus’s mission system), user interfaces, character animation, and anything heavy on linear algebra. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of iPhone programming. More than anything, I enjoy technical challenges — I’ve written code to combine skinned meshes, dynamically create plants on terrain, and load and store user-made levels in Splume. I also made a custom breathalyzer peripheral that interfaced with a pong game!

I joined up with Flashbang a little over a year ago, just as Splume was getting started. I’d just finished my degree in Mathematics, and was finishing up a NASA Space Grant-funded project, making an interactive simulation of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. I’d decided to put off graduate school for a year or two, and the prospect of getting paid to work with my best friends on awesome games I loved was too good to pass up! (Ok so it was a toss-up between awesome games and trying to get a position with the USGS, but I really like maps and rocks)

My favorite part of working for Flashbang is the excellent way that we all play off one another’s ideas, turning things that are funny into things that are patently absurd. Case in point: the genesis of Off-Road Velociraptor Safari. The original idea behind the game was a “vehicle physics test with terrain.” I was having dinner one night with Adam, who told me, “Matt, I have an idea for this vehicle test that we want to do.” I responded, “Wait don’t tell me. You’re driving around an off-road jeep catching raptors with a giant snare?” He grinned and replied, “I was going to say ATV and a net-launcher, but yeah.” My brother and I may have dinosaurs on the brain. It pretty much snowballed once we told everyone else. What if it was a raptor driving the jeep? What if he were wearing a monocle and pith helmet? Then of course there is the infamous feathers issue, which I campaigned for after reading Turner et al.’s article in Science.

I’m excited that we now have a place to keep everyone abreast of our current projects — especially the iPhone ones, which I’m really digging. I’d love to answer anyone’s technical questions, and be a pedantic sod regarding the scientific accuracy of our games! For instance — the text in Minotaur China Shop should really be written in Linear A, the script of the ancient Minoan civilization. It makes little sense for the minotaur of ancient Crete to be writing in Latin characters, after all.

O Hail Eris!