Sam Shields
Founder at Shields Games and Research
Burlingame, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSam Shields is a founder and PhD-trained game systems designer with eight years of experience building systems-driven games, AI tools, and procedural content pipelines that prioritize balanced, human-centered play. He blends rigorous research—authoring systems like BrawlerAGD, FighterDDA, and Playtrace Arc Search presented at venues including CHI and ToG—with product and engineering experience at companies such as Zynga and Lifion by ADP. Sam moves fluidly from blue-sky design to production-ready systems, having shipped procedural generation tooling across multiple mechanics and architected identity and internal tooling at scale. He mentors students, organizes creative game communities, and applies symbolic AI and automated playtesting to accelerate design iteration. Notably, his research explores emergent gameplay impacts of tuning and director-like AI, bringing a rare empirical lens to practical game balance and narrative systems.
8 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
University of California Santa CruzBachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis
Github Skills (15)
wireless10
bluetooth10
keyboard9
azerothcore8
designer8
firmware8
crossword8
nrf528
zephyr7
rpg7
2d-game5
firefox-addon2
chrome-extension2
chrome2
hyper1
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
smshields/zmk-config
Dec 2020 - Apr 2021
Contributions:44 commits, 10 pushes in 4 months
Shields-Games-and-Research/BrawlerAGD
Oct 2021 - Jan 2024
An Automated Game Designer targeted at the "Brawler" game genre.
Contributions:8 reviews, 16 PRs, 82 pushes in 2 years 2 months
2d-gamecrosswordgenreazerothcorerpg
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