Hi I'm Declan, Lead UI Programmer at Big Ant Studios. I am just going to give you a brief overview on what I enjoy doing.
At the end of 2024 I picked up reading after never really being into my whole life, and I fell in love, I read 30 books in 2025 Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson is my favourite book thanks for asking.
I enjoy cycling casually for some exercise I have some amazing bike trails where I live
Games, we love games, The game that got me into thinking of UI was of course Psersona 5 I never thought UI could be so expressive.
Love 2d Platformers Celeste got me into the genre, First Person shooters, been playing Call Of Duty on and off sicne I was 10, I love my time trial games, Vholume, SEUM SpeedRunners from Hell, Track Mania.
Buy my all time favourite game is Portal I have over 150 hours in it and at my peak I could beat the game in 15 minutes :flex_emoji_here:
I also have a cat, her name is Caramello (scroll to the bottom to see her, I didn't want her to steal the show)
Employment
BigAnt Studios
At my time at BigAnt, I have gone above and beyond, in forwarding the UI. Managing a team of 6 training juniors and wokring on stronger interdepartment communication.
Working with C++ and LUA we have made leaps forward in our widget systems, and pushing harder on Noesis then ever before we keep making better and better projects.
Shipping 7 products
KineticIT
During my time a t KineticIT I was on the MetroTrains Melbourne account doing Level 1 Tech support for the employees.
A day by day at this job was answering calls troubleshooting issues, writing tickets, escalating issues. Working on tickets we had coming in when where was no calls.
During this time I learnt some powershell to generate emails for me since we got quite a bit of templated data that came in that we needed to get approvals for.
I was quick to pick up the Metro Systems and quickly became someone people would come and ask questions too. Since at the time of me starting they had loss 6 employees so most of the team was new and there was a lot to cover.
5 months in I was put on the rotating shift roster which handles Metro and Vline Level 1 Tech support which meant I had to learn on the job a new system with no help since I was the only one on for most of my shifts since they took place between 4pm - 11pm or 11pm to 8am.
Education
Academy of Interactive Entertainment
Advanced Diploma of Processional Game Development
[2020] - [2021]During this course I learnt C++ and C# since this happened during the Pandemic I had to learn to motivate myself to get work handing in on time which was something different since I was always use to being in a classroom where there was nothing really else to do.
Skills I learnt through out these years was the ability to research topics and and form understandings quickly and them implement my findings into code. Matching Cubes was an example of a research project
Develop for hardware that I was not familiar with in the form of the Oculus Go/ Oculus Quest 2
Working as a team to produce small projects like Mage Escape
GOTAFE Shepperton
Certificate IV in Cyber Security
[2019] - [2019]GOTAFE Shepperton
Certificate III in Information Technology and Digital Media
[2019] - [2019]