teehees-revenge
2022–2023 · DigiPen Institute of Technology – SIT · Team project · Role: Graphics Lead
A
3D adventure shooter running on a
custom C++ game engine built from scratch with a
Vulkan renderer. The player escapes an underground lab as an experimental creature, uncovering the story behind their own creation along the way. Vulkan’s explicit model meant the engine owned everything the driver would otherwise hide — memory allocation, synchronization, descriptor and pipeline management.
Role and responsibilities
Graphics lead — owner of the rendering side of the engine:
- Built and owned the Vulkan render pipeline, shader management, and GPU resource handling — allocation, descriptor sets, and synchronization
- Improved engine performance by ~20% through profiling-driven refactors: reduced draw calls, tightened memory access patterns, and eliminated redundant per-frame computation. Profile first, then cut — not guesswork
- Debugged and fixed graphics and gameplay bugs across subsystems, including ones outside my own area
- Unblocked teammates by picking up stalled and incomplete tasks to keep the project on schedule — technical leadership plus hands-on delivery
Learning outcomes
- Vulkan’s explicit contract — when nothing is implicit, correctness in synchronization and resource lifetime is entirely yours to get right
- Profiling-driven optimization: measure, find the real bottleneck, fix that one — the 20% came from targeted changes, not broad rewrites
- Shader programming and GPU resource management at scale
- Leading a subsystem inside a larger team: setting the rendering API’s shape, then supporting everyone who consumes it
- Judging when to hold the line on your own work vs. absorb someone else’s blocked task to protect the schedule
Build & media
| File |
Description |
Teehee's Revenge_Setup.exe |
Windows installer |
Teehee's Revenge.mp4 |
Gameplay video |
Related
Follows
AfterLife — same graphics-lead role, moved from
OpenGL/2D to
Vulkan/3D.