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Hi, I'm

Derek Gu

Mobile Games & Apps Expert

AI Engineer

Options Strategist

About me

•  18 years of experience in developing mobile games, apps and backends.

•  Worked in many industries including AAA game companies, network security, telecom and finance.

•  I'm a highly creative and technically strong individual with a love for art. I enjoy digital painting and creating indie games in my spare time, and I'm known for my visual thinking abilities.

•  I'm currently integrating artificial intelligence technologies with my trading system to help me achieve better returns.   Learn more

Case Studies

Games

Battle Planes Mars Lander

App + Backend

My Rogers

Apps

Optactic Recipes123 Just Draw Flashcards
battleplanes

Battleplanes

A variant of the classic battleship game, this game was originally developed in 2011 in less than 4 months using pure C++ code and in-house OpenGL ES engine. In 2023 I upgraded this game to modern platform and design using Unity and C#.

AI Speed Up Development

AI tools such as MidJourney and ChatGPT helps me speed up the development process. In less than a month I was able to add tons of new features, new avatars and bring the game to feature complete.

Firebase Firestore as Backend

I used firestore as the backend and build a brand-new asynchronous multiplayer system on top. Users can play this game over network and send emoji to each other in real time.

Separation of Logic and Presentation

In order to speed up development of battleplanes AI, the core logic are separated from the presentation layer. This technique is common in app development, but rarely used in game. This method allows the AI to be developed and tested separately using normal C# project, and doesn't have to do the heavy-loading of Unity run-time.

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My Rogers

MyRogers

Rogers Communications Inc.

This app manages users' personal account with Rogers communications. I worked on both the Android version and the backend.

Hybrid Web App

The app is partially webview embedded in a native app. Handling cookie is one of the challenges with this design.

High Tech Backend

To handle Rogers' 13.7 million subscribers, we built a state-of-art backend to handle the traffic between the middleware and the customers. Some cool features include

  • Scalar and Play Framework
  • NoSQL in-memory db (Cassandra) as caching.
  • Amazon ec2 to dynamically scale servers based on demand
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Optactic screenshot

Optactic

This app empower options traders to construct wide range of options strategies easily, while intuitively visualizing associated risks and rewards.

From Python to Flutter

The technology behind optactic are originally part of in-house algorithm trading python library. They are ported to flutter sharing the same set of unity tests. This not only reduced development time, it also helps the app achieve high accuracy and high quality.

Custom-Made Flutter UI

The interactive chart is built from ground up. The chart can handle custom gesture motion and update visually in real time using least amount of draw calls.

A new UI was developed to allow user change values of strike price continuously by sliding finger across the value bar. It is like a slider, but without boundary.

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Mars Lander

This unique game was developed using pure C++. The game and its 100 levels are all designed and developed over period of 4 months. It achieved top 100 games ranking in Canadian App Store.

In-Game Map Editor

This tool was orginally developed to speed up in-game level design. It's so successful it has become a feature itself.

In Development

The game was pulled off app store due to my contract while working for Gameloft. I'm currently rebuilding this game using Unity and adding a new feature called social level design. I can't wait to show you the new version.

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JD Flashcards

Just Draw Flashcards

This app is built using SwiftUI. Built for Apple pencil, it allows users to write naturally as if they are working with a physical index card. It is jam-packed with several learning methods to help users memorize.

Feature Packed
  • Leitner learning system
  • text-to-speech
  • Multiple choice mode
  • Timed review

Recipes123

Recipes123

This is a social recipe app, allowing users to create and share recipes easily. The app supports English and Chinese languages, and it is developed in less than a month using Flutter and Firebase.

Social-Sharing Proof-of-Concept

The goal of this app is to develop a framework for social sharing app. This app tests many social ideas such as sharing app content using deeplinking and content rating using favorites.

Two-Tiers Publishing

The biggest challenge to any social sharing app is content moderation and quality control. Traditionally this is done by lots of man power. For many small businesses, this is not feasible due to high cost of investment. Here I tried to solve this problem using a two-tiers publishing methods. User can publish any recipes freely, but they can only share them to their own target customers. App owner can select quality recipe and make them visible (featured) by promoting the publishing status to another level.

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