About Me
I am Nicholas Gulezian, and I’ve wanted to make games my entire life.
I grew up playing classic FPS games such as: Half-Life, Doom, Quake, and Unreal, and there has always been a special place in my heart for those kinds of games.
My other favorites include first-person puzzlers such as Portal, The Talos Principle, and QUBE, and I have a keen interest in audio games, be it classic rhythm such as DDR and Beat Saber, or more abstract, such as 140.
Growing up with the itch to make games kept me exploring what I could do with the abilities I had at the time. Early on this meant making my own table-top games, where one time I made one based on a local theme park, and I even got their permission to pitch it to Hasbro. While Hasbro didn’t take it, the theme park gave me free season passes for my family and I as a thank you, and that’s something that has always stuck with me.
Once I started learning programming, my time spent brainstorming and writing down infinite ideas turned into exploring what kind of small projects I could do. Throughout high-school, I was always convincing my teachers to let me turn in projects in the form of a game, getting creative about how I could accomplish what was needed for the project by making a game out of it, and fortunately a lot of the time the answer would be yes.
I attended DigiPen Institute of Technology in 2014 enrolled in the "Real-Time Interactive Simulation program", however, after working on a couple of game projects and spending plenty of time coding, I realized I was very interested in what goes into audio. I switched my degree after my first year, and continued taking classes to help me further specialize in audio programming and implementation in addition to the normal CS classes. In 2018, I graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Computer Science and Digital Audio.
I gained a lot of experience in using the Wwise programming API for both custom engines and with use in the Unreal Engine, and have created many tools and extended features to help the teams I’ve worked with. In addition to Wwise and UE4, I also gained experience with implementing digital filters and synthesizers in C and C++.
Before I graduated, I started a part-time position at Highwire Games which I continued full-time after I graduated, and over the years I worked my way up into a Lead Engineer position. I helped in shipping Golem, a PSVR exclusive, Six Days in Fallujah which is currently released on Steam in early access, and even created a procedural generation technology which has been officially patented.
You can learn all about my technical skills and projects across my Resume, Professional , and Academic Projects sections, so here is a bit more about myself. In my spare time I will absolutely still play games. Working on games hasn't ruined playing them for me, I just might be a bit more picky about which I put my spare time into. I also love to spend time with my wife and son, watch movies and shows of all sorts, go on adventures, and when I find extra time I like to work on my side projects such as my own games, music, videos, and very in depth content for a D&D campaign I co-DM for. My side projects are typically creative outlets for me to flex a part of my itch for creation that I may not necessarily hit from work.
You'll find that I always wear shorts and a t-shirt year-round regardless of weather; if I am wearing pants, you know it is a special occasion.
I’m easy to get along with, goofy, always looking for a laugh, and try my best to spread happiness to those around me.
I take pride in my work and have a high bar for myself. Regardless of the task, even those trying and difficult, I’m able to find the fun and make light of situations that aid in always solving a problem in a satisfactory way.
Other than that I spend a lot of my time learning as much as I can about the things that I am interested in, and I find that I tend to have a mindset as stated in the following quote.