Bachelor of Games and Interactivity/Bachelor of Computer Science
Jaime Shirazi studied computer science (games programming major) and game design with a double degree at Swinburne University of Technology.
Experience withUnityUnity
Style Slasher Gameplay Demo
Style Slasher was a 2025 capstone project at Swinburne University where Jaime Shirazi was the primary mechanics programmer. Style Slasher was showcased at PAX Aus 2025.
Play Style Slasher on itch.io
Rainbow Reef Turtle Chief Trailer
Rainbow Reef Turtle Chief was a 2-week colaborative project between Jaime Shirazi, Ian Scheepers, Marcus Jordaan and Hugh Craig. Jaime Shirazi was the primary programmer for this project. This project was awarded first place for people's choice in the 2024 Ubisoft Game Jam.
Play Rainbow Reef Turtle Chief on itch.io
Infest-Mason Gameplay Demo
Infest-Mason was a 5-day collaborative project between Jaime Shirazi and Ian Scheepers. Jaime Shirazi was responsible for programming and engine setup.
Play Infest-Mason on itch.ioChompions
Chompions is an arcade-style 2-player local multiplayer game developed in a 4 person team where Jaime Shirazi served as a programmer.
Play Chompions on itch.io
File Exploiter (upcoming)
File Exploiter is an upcoming 2026 capstone project at Swinburne University where co-creator Jaime Shirazi serves as a mechanics designer and composer, as well as assisting with engine setup and programming. File Exploiter will be showcased at PAX Aus 2026.
It will be available closer to PAX AUS 2026.
Team Experience
Jaime Shirazi has been an active member of several games projects.
Portfolio
ProgrammingMusicDesign
Graphics
Resource Efficiency Demo
This slide demonstrates the packing efficiency of the system compared to Unity's broad-encompassing + bounds-based frustrum calculation.
Quality Demo
This slide shows Unity's default packing requiring quadruple the square size in order to achieve similar quality, and a custom soft threshold applied for cleaner edges.
Near/Far Plane Shrinkage
This slide describes the near/far plane shrinking performed for the greatest bit depth precision.
Multi-threaded Vertex Skinning
This slide demonstrates the multi-threaded logic that performs skinning on a pre-baked reduced vertex network to calculate a tighter-fitting bounding volume. Each sphere is a vertex being skinnned.
Live Packing & Shrinkage Demo
This slide demonstrates the dynamic packing and shrinking applied to two targets depending on player viewing angles. The shadowmap is shown as 1:1, but its resolution changes to distribute the same square pixel count while maintaining 1:1 aspect ratio tiles.
Skinned Vertex Shrinkage Demo
This slide demonstrates the shadowmap efficiency with and without cropping to fit using the skinned vertices. The shadowmap is shown as 1:1, but its resolution changes to distribute the same square pixel count while maintaining 1:1 aspect ratio tiles.
Priority Shadows
Based on the close-up shadows technique in Detroit: Become Human, I built a system that performs additional render passes within Unity to render high quality shadows minimising memory footprint.
The system computes skinned vertices for the target renderers, crops to fit, and adds raster passes. Custom shader logic utilises the shadowmap when marked.
- Render Graph compatible
- SRP Batcher compatible
- Optimised for clustered forward rendering & MSAA
- Multi-threaded with Burst Compiler
Frame Debugger breakdown
Using just the results of one opaque pass, with zero MSAA artefacts:
- A stencil is extracted, a blurred background with a dropshadow is formed, and the background is added behind the characters after they were drawn.
- An outline is created without juggling and merging several seperate colour/depth backbuffers.
- Cinematic bars are drawn behind characters, after post processing, seamlessly, for the cost of drawing 4 unlit triangles.
Rim-in-rear-light effect from Mario Kart World
When a strong light source is behind a character, a fresnel effect is mixed in to enhance the rim light effect for the sake of stylisation. This is based on observations on Mario Kart World's character shader.
Skin and hair shadows are also brightened when the light aligns with the camera, a stylisation step which improves the apparent softness of the skin. This brightening has an off-axis falloff to avoid artifically bright skin in darkness.
Flattened face lighting
Normals are partially derived from positional offset from head center to flatten the shading on the face for stylisation.
Single-colour hair shader
The hair shader utilises Kajiya-Kay and was designed to derive its parameters from a single base colour input.
Eye shading
The eye shifts hue in light and draws dynamic white highlight circles based on the primary light direction.
Comparison with RealToon URP Package
The shader replaced RealToon in my projects due to heavy shader variant amounts ballooning build times.
Custom Ubershader
A fully-custom HLSL ubershader in URP used for every material on all characters. PBR-based with stylised elements, with artist-friendly controls.
- SRP Batcher compatible via RSUV
- Priority Shadows reciever
- Clustered forward compatible
- Heavy stencil utilisation
Cheap Approximate Subsurface Scattering
Subsurface ScatteringForward rendering & MSAA compatible
Based on my research into Luigi's Mansion 3's techniques during cutscenes.
Before opaques, the system performs screen-space shadows utilising the depth normals/stencil values to skip pixels that won't be used. The buffer is blurred, then used by the skin shader, hinted by thickness values baked into the mesh's vertex colours.
Jump Flood Outline
Jump Flood OutlineForward rendering & MSAA compatible
Implementation of Ben Golus' blog post on very wide outlines.
Utilises the jump flood algorithm to exponentially decrease cost as outlines get wider. Hinted by MSAA to achieve even smoother outlines.
My implementation dynamically schedules Render Graph passes as you increase the width in post processing settings.
HDRP Contact Shadows Diagram
Contact ShadowsForward-compatible via screen-space shadows
Port of HDRP's Contact Shadows to URP's Render Graph.
Scrapped due to poor MSAA compatibility, inaccuracy & main-light-only support.
Tiny Glade Contact Shadows implementation
Contact ShadowsForward-compatible via screen-space shadows
Port of Tiny Glade's Raymarcher for Contact Shadows to URP's Render Graph.
Unity's depth setup lead to issues recreating the bias hack that they used to fix shadow acne, described in this talk.
Scrapped due to poor MSAA compatibility, inaccuracy & main-light-only support.
Depth Of Field autofocus
Depth of FieldForward rendering & MSAA compatible
Override of Unity's own Depth of Field effect.
Replaces some internal render pass dispatching logic to autofocus multiple targets and force consistent screen-space bokeh size across resolutions.
In this example, the brown-haired and blue-haired characters are both selected to be in focus.
Depth Of Field blur hijacking
Depth of FieldForward rendering & MSAA compatible
Override of Unity's own Depth of Field effect.
Hijacks the Depth of Field pass to get a screen-space blur for "free" when already paying the cost of Depth of Field.
Frame Debugger breakdown of pause menu
Performant Pause SilhouetteForward rendering & MSAA compatible
Custom render pass rendering a pause effect fast with near-zero memory cost.
This entire effect is achieved with a single depth/stencil-only render pass (hijacks the camera depth texture) and a guassian blur for the background and drop shadow (batched).
Various Effects
The following demonstrates various graphical systems built for projects.
- SRP & Render Graph compatible
Animation
Post-processed markerless motion capture
The system leverages MediaPipe AI inferencing to solve for facial expression in background threads, and records it all in real-time.
Hybrid jaw solving
The hybrid jaw solver leverages tuned face-space measurments to more accurately infer the placement of the jaw.
Live demonstration
The hybrid eyebrow solver compensates for the largely inaccurate inferred eyebrow blendshapes.
Using this system overall vastly outperforms ARKit's depth-only markerless processing pipeline, which fails to detect eyebrows individually.
Burst-compatible Savitzky-Golay filter
After recording, additional smoothing is predominantly constituted of multi-threaded burst-compiled Savitzky-Golay denoising passes.
Markerless Motion Capture
This live capture system, built on top of MediaPipeUnityPlugin, autonomously records and post-processes webcam and microphone data into timeline-ready animation and voiceover.
A set of calibrated algorithms assist MediaPipe's AI-inferenced blendshapes by performing normalised measurements on the AI-inferenced facial landmarks.
- Markerless & setup-agnostic
- Multi-threaded & Burst compatible
- Optimised for production efficiency
Dynamic look-at demo
This dynamic system retargets humanoid rigs to stylistically look toward desired positions. The system increases appeal by leveraging animation principles such as anticipation/overshoot and curves. Integration with the blinking system shuffles planned blink intervals to increase the likelihood that a blink will synchronise with the large head movement.
Off-axis bending demo
This system mixes transforms and/or blendshapes at runtime depending on viewpoint yaw/pitch to achieve a stylised illustrated facial features effect.
Crying effect
These tear streams use a baked UV lookup map in face-UV-space to draw streams directly into the face texture via shaders. These tear drops are simple circle meshes with custom shaders. The tear drop pooling at the chin is animated using a sequence of blendshapes.
Fully programmatic rig
This system dispatches multi-threaded workers to animate a turtle swimming completely in-code using basic input parameters. The system also allows the head to turn to face points of interest within proximity. At scale, this could run on thousands of turtles at once without issue.
Sprite rigging & sorting
This pin puppet rig for Style Slasher has an outfit-accommodating configuration with IK to firmly plant the feet. In order to accomodate the numerous outfits the player character needed to wear, there is an intricate dynamic sprite sorting system that allows clothes to consistently appear in front of the body, which appears in front of the outline, including for sprites that have multiple weights (skirts).
Procedural Animation
The following is a collection of various reactive animation systems.
- Multi-threaded & Burst compatible
Core Systems
TexDerive demo
TexDerive is a highly integrated reactive texture deriver that allows non-destructive effect chains to be applied to other textures within your project, like material variants but for textures. TexDerive automatically detects changes on your source texture, and updates itself in response. Its output is a normal PNG file with standard texture import settings like every other texture, but with an extra menu for chain setup.
TexDerive is intended to allow partial quality increases in cases where additional texture maps would benefit the quality of a material but the time investment cannot be budgeted. TexDerive will allow you to quickly approximate this map, no matter how work-in-progress your source asset is.
Fast Animated Image Converter
Fast Animated Image Converter (FAIC) is a free GUI utility that unifies the workflow for creating any and all kinds of animated images. FAIC is built directly in Windows Forms to ensure that the user interface is functional and compatible. It is built to utilise an Ffmpeg binary directly, allowing users to individually upgrade, modify, or outright bypass the program all together by using the generated arguments. Right clicking on media in file explorer reveals a shortcut to launch FAIC directly. Every animation on this webpage has been generated using this tool.
Unified Blender tool pack
Many blender tools for specific modelling tasks are bundled into a single repository that automatically increments, builds and deploys after every commit. This allows blender workflows to be unified across machines.
Dialogue sequence editor
This editor tool displays dialogue sequence scriptable objects in a highly reactive and guardrailed editor. Syntax is validated for animation, look-at and effect cues, greatly reducing typos and improving the clarity of the script.
This iteration of the editor displays directly on top of a scriptable object, and displays all dialogue linearly, though branching dialogues can be achieved through links to other objects. Animation state carries through to the below steps via a rolling scanner.
Dialogue sequence editor (Graph Toolkit)
This editor tool displays dialogue sequence scriptable objects in a highly reactive and guardrailed editor. Syntax is validated for animation, look-at and effect cues, greatly reducing typos and improving the clarity of the script.
This is a work-in-progress adaptation of the system to Unity's early Graph Editor Toolkit. Unfortunately, the framework does not yet have the UI Toolkit flexibility that my system requires, so the conversion is on hiatus.
Normal map scaler for Paint.NET
The following tools are for Paint.NET. Each repository has a highly detailed README section that explains in artist-friendly terms the utility of each tool.
This specific tool leverages HLSL math and matrix transformation effects available within CodeLab's GPU Image framework to achieve the logic normal map scaling requires. It is less efficient than bespoke shader code, but substantially more portable and more than sufficient.
Channel packer for Paint.NET
The following tools are for Paint.NET. Each repository has a highly detailed README section that explains in artist-friendly terms the utility of each tool.
This tool aims to be the ultimate channel packing utility for game developers that still retains an intuitive UI within the limits of CodeLab. The best solution to this problem was to express the inputs as part of natural language sentences, explaining what the plugin will do.
Mutually exclusive packer for Paint.NET
The following tools are for Paint.NET. Each repository has a highly detailed README section that explains in artist-friendly terms the utility of each tool.
Mutually exclusive packing is an otherwise poorly documented technique that allows you to double the effective amount of channels in your packed textures. As the concept is too complex to describe in the interface alone, the repository contains a highly detailed explanation of when the technique is best applied.
Developer Tools
The following are various developer tools created both within and outside of Unity.
Virtual corkboard demo
Virtual Corkboardcompletely arbritrary cards to have deterministic string-based connections regardless of position and obstaclesthe design makes heavy use of compute shaders to asynchronously brute force every best-case path (pathfinding with A*) to find the least complicated string layout
Procedural level assembly demo
Procedural Levelsvisually appealing, local, deterministic procedural level generationthe terrain is generated using tuned terrain patterns with randomness, and tile sprites are selected based on rules with neighbouring tiles
Feeler-based camera framing
Dynamic Camera Framingcamera framing to always fit unknown room layouts in Style Slasherseveral feelers are propogated from a slightly lookahead position to analyse the general shape of the room, the results of which are used to weight the camera away from framing the walls. This is a similar approach to that of Kirby and the Forgotten Land described in this GDC presentation
Cut/paste grid system
Flexible Sliceable Grida robust universal framework for handling types of grid-aligned gameplay elements that could be cut and paste by the playerthis system consolidates grid objects into a single base class, with custom collections to make operating on an arbritrary collection of objects easy and readable. By treating all grid objects in one unified framework, it minimises per-object bugs and increases speed of development iteration. In this demo, the red and blue diamonds are the corners of a rectangular selection, and only the windows can be partially cut (not the clock)
Native motion controls demo
Native Motion Controlsgeneric gyro reading across most major controllers, as Unity does not support gyro nativelythe JoyShockLibrary project is imported as a managed plug-in with a comprehensive C# wrapper
Input UI
Remappable Controlsseperate gamepad and keyboard/mouse bindingscustom sequences allow the player to freely bind to whatever input source they desire, with automatic vendor-matched controller button icons and serialization unified under a shared save framework
Various Core Systems
These slides contain a selection of systems developed to solve complex problems during development.
This specific system was developed in response to the need for .
To achieve this, .
Audio
Fully automated recording pipeline in-engine
Live Capture
This system allows creators to record their performance and microphone at the same time, and automatically synchronises, processes and prepares the take alongside the motion capture. This system is heavily integrated into Unity, only leveraging external software (Reaper) for robust external VST support. Reaper integration is highly modular, only launching the program and manipulating files on the system.
The system uses multi-threaded & burst-compatible code to quickly process performances regardless of length. This processing includes specialised audio leveling that measures and normalises speaking volume, ensuring consistency across environments and takes before running through the VST chain.
Multi-threaded spectrum visualiser
Spectrum Visualiser
This system employs off-thread workers to crunch audio samples within unity through a fast fourier transform to visualise frequency ranges. Once the samples are fetched from the main thread, they are moved to unmanaged memory and processed entirely within burst jobs.
Progression-sensitive pitched sound effects
Key-sensitive SFX
This system can read provided metadata along background music to adjust pitched sound effects to avoid clashing with the music. In this case, it is applied to the whistle effect. It also looks slightly ahead so that late presses do not sustain a stale chord into the next.
Audio Systems
These slides demonstrate audio-oriented programming within Unity.
Experience
HDRP Experience
Primarily a Universal Render Pipeline/Scriptable Render Pipeline developer, Jaime Shirazi has plenty of High Definition Render Pipline experience as well.
VR Mario Kart game built in URP for Meta Quest
VR Metal Gear game built in URP for Meta Quest
YouTube Trailer for an MGSVR update
VR Experience
Jaime Shirazi has built and shipped multiple successful VR games, and been contracted by Pimax VR to port them to their platform.
Cute frutiger aero bossa nova
The File Exploiter EP is available now on all major streaming platforms!
Heavy swing with multiple dynamic layers
Composition for Chompions
Beautifully tragic ballad
Energetic and funky
Peaceful retro loop
The File Exploiter EP is available now on all major streaming platforms!
Composition for Infest-Mason
Jazz & Funk
These excerpts are taken from pieces that were composed, recorded (where applicable), mixed and mastered solo.
Composition for Rainbow Reef Turtle Chief
Glorious woodwind-heavy winning fanfare
The File Exploiter EP is available now on all major streaming platforms!
Swung 16ths confident/triamphant piece with boiling energy
Cinematic building/marching piece
Silently tense atmosphere piece
Piece representing loss of control
Driving piece with motivation
Overtly and strongly tense atmosphere piece
Orchestra
These excerpts are taken from pieces that were composed, recorded (where applicable), mixed and mastered solo.
Synth-heavy trance
The File Exploiter EP is available now on all major streaming platforms!
Hyperpop-ish high-energy loop with J-pop influence
The File Exploiter EP is available now on all major streaming platforms!
Innocent nursery rhyme
Retro 4-on-the-floor EDM piece
Reflective lo-fi
Various Styles
These excerpts are taken from pieces that were composed, recorded (where applicable), mixed and mastered solo.
Collaborative arrangement of overworldB
Arrangement of Rainbow Road (Super Mario Kart)
Light bossa nova arrangement of Koopa Beach
Menacing/evolving arrangement of Venta Black
Arrangements
These excerpts are taken from pieces that were arranged, recorded (where applicable), mixed and mastered solo.
Rainbow Reef Turtle Chief trailer
Jaime Shirazi was a designer on Rainbow Reef Turtle Chief, which was a winner among 50 submissions to the Ubisoft Australia Game Jam in 2024. It was generally regarded as highly polished and well put-together. You can read more about it in this article.
Play Rainbow Reef Turtle Chief on itch.ioFile Exploiter (upcoming)
Jaime Shirazi is the co-creator and a designer on File Exploiter, slated to be demonstrated at PAX AUS 2026 and released soon thereafter.
It will be available closer to PAX AUS 2026.
Chompions
Jaime Shirazi was a designer on Chompions, a local multiplayer fighting game.
Play Chompions on itch.io
One Night at Werner trailer
Jaime Shirazi is the creator of One Night at Werner, a unique sit-and-survive parody game inspired by Five Nights at Freddy's. The game did not have a large reach, but is positively recieved among those that have played it.
Play One Night at Werner on itch.io
Carolina's Apartment gameplay
Jaime Shirazi is the creator of Carolina's Apartment, a short interactive murder mystery visual novel with a branching narrative structure.
Play Carolina's Coworker on itch.io (directly in your browser!)Infest-Mason trailer
Jaime Shirazi was the game designer behind Infest-Mason, the winner of its respective game jam.
Play Infest-Mason on itch.io
and many more...
With over 7 years experience in Unity alone, Jaime Shirazi has been responsible for innumerable games, and is well accustomed to the process.
These games are all unreleased and haven't appeared anywhere else throughout this website.
Game Designs
Rigged ruffled shirt
This shirt was modelled and rigged in Blender, and textured in Substance Painter.
Full character showreel
This character was modelled, rendered and composed within Blender, and textured in Substance Painter.
Stylised expressive dog character
This room was modelled, rigged and textured in blender, intended for offline rendering of ARKit playback.
Holding cell environment
This room was modelled, textured and rendered in Maya.
3D
Metamodernism in MGS4
Contingency in Mario Kart
The MDA Framework in FNAF
Upkeying in MGSV
Typologies & Flow State in BOTW
Video Essays
These video essays apply game design theory to games in order to study their strengths. These videos were written, recorded and edited by Jaime Shirazi.
Jaime Shirazi also has some social media experience, with 778k+ main channel views and 268k+ music channel views.
See the playlist
Asymptotes
Jaime Shirazi was also an organiser for the local games event "Asymptotes".