I am
Evan Samuel Mickelson

I am a Computer Science and Economics student at Brown University, and I am well-versed in software engineering and product management. I am also a passionate game developer and musician. This website exists as a place for employers to see my experiences and for me to show off my software, music, and thoughts in a centralized place.


As a participant in Capitalism, I seek gainful employment. My latest attempt was from May to August of 2024. I am happy to say that, thanks to the purchasing of V-bucks from the credit cards of millions of parents worldwide, I was employed at Epic Games as a "Gameplay Programming Intern," where I worked on Fortnite Festival using Unreal Engine and C++ on the Harmonix team.


From June to November of 2023, I worked at 2K Games as a "Software Engineering, Product Management Intern" (a bit of a mouthful, I know). There, I helped analyze the onboarding experience and costs of their backend services used across 2K's titles by incorporating them in my own Unreal projects, talking to customers, and undergoing market research.


At Brown University, I am part of the executive board for Brown RISD Game Developers. During my time there, I have contributed to the development of five video games, helped manage our yearly average of roughly 100 students, and taught other students how to use Unity and Unreal effectively. I have also been a TA for two computer science courses, Computer Graphics, and 2D Game engines.


The website you are seeing was made by *yours truly* using Next JS with Tailwind CSS. You can find the code for it Here

Technical Skills Overview

I have been programming and creating games since before high school, and thus have a deep understanding of applied programming practices and experience with a wide range of languages. Here are some languages and tools I am familiar with, and where I made use of them.

  • Unreal Game Engine: In the summer of 2024, I was at Epic Games. Specifically, I was an intern on the Harmonix team where I worked on Fortnite Festival, the "Guitar Hero" gamemode for Fortnite. There I extensively used C++, Blueprints, and many of Unreal's other features to create cheats, fix bugs, and to improve the developer and user experience. During my time at 2K games, I used Unreal Game Engine to explore the onboarding process for their internal games backend services. In the summer of 2022, I taught the engine to 30 teenagers at my time camp counselling at iDTech. I have also used the engine to help create US(FPS), a packaged themed first person shooter, in Brown RISD Game Developers. Lastly, I made a prototype map for the VR game Pavlov, as well as a VR fireplace simulator for the Brown 2023 hackathon.
  • Go: I used Go to implement the RAFT distributed dictionary protocol for a distributed systems course. Along with that, I am using it for the backend of a news headline and summarizing website for webscraping, serverside rendering, API handling, and database access.
  • React, Typescript, CSS: Along with using Next for this website. I have also made use of React for school projects in my school's software engineering course and for the frontend for a project in Brown's Entrepreneurship Club.
  • C++: In Computer Graphics, I made a realtime renderer (using OpenGL), a software raytracer, and paint application using C++. In Computer Networks, I created an implementation of the IP and TCP protocol with virtual router and host nodes. In a joint final project between the two classes, I created a multiplayer Quake clone that utilized a custom built ECS and a game client-server architecture. It uses OpenGL for rendering. For it, I with 2 other people created physics, rendering, gameplay, and networking sytems. Lastly, for my computer systems course, I created Snake with custom levels, security and page table features for WeenseyOS (a unix-like OS project), and the logic for a key value store all using C++
  • Unity Game Engine and C#: I have used Unity for over 6 years. In that time, I have released 6 projects online and created over a dozen other prototypes and small projects. From that, I have gained a deep understanding of the game engine, C#, and object oriented programming practices. See the projects section for information about the released projects
  • Godot:Along with making prototypes, I was the lead programmer for Origami Bird Battle with in the Brown-RISD Game Developers. I helped program, design, and architect the game and its systems while helping 10 other programmers with varying skill levels learn and use Godot effectively.
  • Python: For my data structures and algorithms class, I implemented the page rank algorithm using Python.
  • Java: Using Java I have created a Wolfenstein-like rendering engine. I also TA's 2D game engines where I helped program, design, and debug other students game engines. In addition, I used Java to create the backend for a course planning website for my software engineering course.