Akiah ( Code, QA ) ;

Shrapnel

Senior Test Engineer

Unreal Jira Jenkins Python AccelByte Python Amazon Web Services Perforce Technical Writing Remote Team Comms + Leadership

Working QA with Lionbridge

What can I say about Akiah? Singularly impressive doesn’t even begin to cover it. Akiah started as a tester on my team, but it didn’t take long for them to prove that... show more
What can I say about Akiah? Singularly impressive doesn’t even begin to cover it. Akiah started as a tester on my team, but it didn’t take long for them to prove that their skills and leadership extended far beyond that role.

Their ability to analyze systems, collaborate cross-discipline, and drive meaningful improvements quickly led to a well-earned promotion as an embedded Senior Tester in the studio. Once embedded, Akiah didn't just meet expectations, they redefined them. They took on additional responsibilities, demonstrated solid coding skills, and created a QA tool that became invaluable to Game Design. This tool leveraged backend playtest data to generate an overlay onto the current game level visualizing every player death: where it occurred, where the fatal shot originated, and the method of death. By providing clear insights into engagement zones, chokepoints, and level flow, Akiah’s work gave designers insightful data to help them refine maps and optimize gameplay.

Beyond technical expertise, Akiah has the ability to bridge gaps between teams, QA, Engineering, UI, and Game Design; ensuring that testing isn't just about finding bugs but about elevating the entire game. Any team would be lucky to have them.
show less
Tim Manley, Shrapnel Head of QA

In 2023, I had just finished my part of coding for a stealth B2B app startup and decided that, with Covid-19 no longer the dominant concern, it was time for me to get a real job. I had been an advocate for games since I was a little kid, and got a degree in Game Development not long earlier, so I decided that it was a good time to try for it. Unfortunately, Games is something of a insider industry-- so I figured my best shot was to get a basic Games Tester position and work my way up.

So, that's what I did.

Fast forward a year, and an opportunity opened up for a tester to be embedded in an STE role at NeonMachine: the creators of the high-profile crypto game Shrapnel. I had worked hard the year prior to make sure that I was well-positioned for a promotion: I had lept into action previously in learning the ropes so that I could onboard and support new testers, and took point on special projects whenever they were available (or whenever I noticed that it would be helpful to start one). I was given the chance to move to Seattle and take on the role. After a lot of anxiety and considerations, I flew across state lines with just a backpack and a dream.

While working as an STE, my focus continued to be on team support roles, including writing lots of tests and documentation, mentoring, and speaking directly to the designers and developers to determine the current state and requirements of the game. Additionally, I took over a lot of the CI/CD requirements of my team, including launching servers, tracking server-side logs and crashes, verifying VCS commits, and staying on top of the State-of-the-Project from a QA perspective. I was also given some opportunities to get back into coding, and built a visualizer tool for the designers. I of course scrubbed out all the company-specific info, but I was given permission to show the anonymized version of the app below ☺️

visualizer tool with random map background and data

NDA-Compliant Visualizer Tool

Unfortunately, Games is also a turbulent industry. After supporting three live releases of the Shrapnel Game, enjoyed by many live players (specific numbers would likely breach my NDA 😉), I, and the rest of my team, were reassigned or let go. I was given the choice to move back to Idaho, but decided that I liked Seattle too much to do that.

Overall, I'm proud of the work that I did, happy with the people I met, and glad for the experience 😁

Shrapnel's upcoming Multiplayer Mode

More About Shrapnel

Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/KNTVpHT-Xgk?si=kiNkU6AyIDlWUVv7

Shrapnel Website: https://www.shrapnel.com

NASA SUITS Research Team

Team Lead, VR Programmer

Unity C# AR VR Project Management Agile Workflow / Kanban UI Unity Multiplayer Mixed Reality Toolkit GitHub PlasticSCM Technical Writing Presentations

XR Research with NASA

Akiah is an incredible programmer, designer and developer. I had the opportunity to work with them for multiple years during their time as a student at Boise State... show more
Akiah is an incredible programmer, designer and developer. I had the opportunity to work with them for multiple years during their time as a student at Boise State University. Akiah has strong leadership skills and did a wonderful job working as a team lead for the Boise State University NASA SUITS team. The NASA SUITS challenge asks students from multiple universities to build an extended reality application to aid in research toward future spacesuit technologies used on the international space station, moon and Mars. Akiah managed a large team of students and tested the team's application in Houston in Spring 2022. Akiah is a strong learner, a team player and an all around wonderful person to work with. Any company would be lucky to work with Akiah.
show less
Dr. Karen Doty, SUITS Team Coordinator

A number of years ago, in 2019, I was invited to join an on-campus research group exploring XR UI features with NASA. At the time I was working on a degree in Games Development. Ironically, between SUITs and VARScent, I spent more time in that degree doing useful research than making games. Still, though, NASA Sounded awesome and VR was the hot new thing, so I dove into it

ARSIS Overview

In my first year on the project, I built navigation tools in C#. A lot of videogame features were untested in VR, so we went about testing them. My personal feature was the 'Beacons' feature and the 'Minimap' function. Between these two features, you could look out over terrain and see points of interest through walls or other obstacles, as well as navigate to them from far away with a heading and a distance. You can see both features in this video that we took during some outreach at my university:

ARSIS Features as of Spring 2022

After my first year on the project, I was asked to take over as Team Lead. This was a very educational position for me, because it gave me my first real chance to practice the Project Management skills that the C.S. degree taught in their "Agile" class. I also was able to put my design experience from my Highschool internship into use, leading design discussions with team members to meet NASA challenge requirements, as well as personally writing the majority of a 30 page technical research proposal, which was accepted by NASA and the Idaho Space Grant Consortium and allowed the team to perform the work (below).

SUITS PROPOSAL

With COVID-19 in full swing, the main objective of the group was survival, and we succeeded on that objective. The SUITs Challenge team is still around today and operational. Our secondary objectives of trying new things in XR, presenting them to NASA, and performing outreach and academic papers, were also all successful to varying degrees. We discovered a lot more 'it doesn't works's than 'it works's, but, hey, that's research!

Preparation for Live Testing at JSC

After my year as Team Lead, and a bonus semester to get some ducks in a row with my Major switch from Computer Science to Games, I graduated, and left the position for another Undergraduate Researcher to fill.

Overall, I really enjoy my time with SUITs. It was a lot of work, and a lot of learning. Everything XR was back then, because the field was so new, and we were all undergrads. I remember the switch from MRTK 2 to 3 throwing our team into disarray until we could adapt, and figuring out how to do checkins for GitHub (to avoid the large binary file problem) was its own adventure 😆