Biography

Michael Barba is a Gameplay Programmer at Lightforge Games working (remotely from Western Massachusetts) on an unannounced project. He graduated in Spring 2022 with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from UMass Amherst, and previously spent 8 months at Blizzard on the Diablo 2 Resurrected Gameplay/UI team as a co-op engineer. He also has created multiple well performing game jam projects, which you can view below.

At Blizzard, working in the last few months of production on D2R, he mainly worked on UI features and UI/Gameplay bugs, which you can read more about here. He also assisted with Nintendo Switch (NintendoSDK), and audio tasks. He authored and owned the Input Method Editor (IME) implementation, interfacing directly with Windows and enabling chat input from Korean, Chinese, and Japanese players.

Michael also previously worked as a Software Engineer (Contract) for Buh! Gaming creating the third person MOBA Tournament of Tamers, where he worked in a variety of areas such as gameplay, minion AI, UI, networking, and animation, in addition to authoring and owning the player analytics system used to balance gameplay and track player retention.

Michael likes to participate in game jams, such as the Brackey's 2020.1 Game Jam, in which his game ANTIGOLF was selected as one of the 10 winners from over 700 games, and the WGJ160, where his game HUEb won 2nd place overall.