Marco Rapino

Marco Rapino

I make things with bits.

Contact Me

About Me

Hi! My name's Marco Rapino and I'm an Italian developer with many years of programming experience in several different fields.
My main areas of expertise are games, mobile applications and web, both frontend and server side
I worked as Senior Game Programmer at Rovio Entertainment Ltd, the game company that gave birth to the worldwide phenomena Angry Birds. I lead the development of many projects - Angry Birds and Bad Piggies the most important ones - plus I've been responsible of integrating many third party tools and libraries to other existing titles, from social networks to ads services. Moreover, I rewrote the in-house particle engine system to support complex particle systems used in the latest company's games.
I've been awarded 2 times as the best employee of the months among 600 people.
After Rovio, in 2012, I decided to found and run in my hometown Lanciano, my own game company Chestnut Games.

Since 2017 I'm working also as CTO and Technical Lead at BestBuying SRL, an Italian software development company with a strong background in e-commerce, web technologies and services.
I can "speak" the following programming languages:
C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Lua, Obj-C, PHP, Lua, Javascript, TypeScript, Dart.

I developed software and games on the following platforms:
Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, Android, WebOS, Symbian (S60 and S^3).

I'm extremely proficient with the Unity engine which I used for several professional and personal projects, mostly for mobile platforms.

My Swiss army knife of tools includes these IDEs:
Visual Studio, PHPStorm, PyCharm, Rider, XCode, VS Code and Android Studio.

I'm a big enthusiast of VR, I own an Oculus headset, a Google DayDream and a Leap motion device with which I love experimenting things for both, commercial and research purposes!

I also have a pretty good background in shader programming and knowledge about the rendering pipeline.

Starting from 2017 I got seriously into machine learning and big data processing, being a big fan of artificial intelligence this was a natural turn for my career!
I love doing 3D art as well, especially when it comes to model characters or toonish/low poly environments.
I'm proficient with the following 3D/SFX/Graphic tools:
Cinema4D, Realflow, Blender, Spine, Endorphine, After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, DaVinci Resolve.

Finally I love photography, me and my Nikon D750 enjoy travelling around the world and picture its greatness into digital frames. :)
In 2018 I also entered the incredible world of astrophotography, please check my gallery on AstroBin if you love pictures of our incredible universe! I also have a YouTube channel and blog about astrophotography that you might want to check it out. :)

Game Projects


Angry Birds

Angry Birds - Classic, Seasons and Rio

The #1 paid app of all time!

Angry Birds is a video game franchise created by Finnish computer game developer Rovio Entertainment. Inspired primarily by a sketch of stylized wingless birds, the first game was first released for Apple's iOS in December 2009. As of October 2010, 12 million copies of the game were purchased from Apple's App Store, and then the company started to design versions for other touchscreen-based smartphones, including the Android, Symbian and Windows Phone operating systems. It has since expanded to video game consoles and PCs. Angry Birds has been praised for its successful combination of addictive gameplay, comical style, and low price. Its popularity led to versions of Angry Birds being created for personal computers and gaming consoles, a market for merchandise featuring its characters, spin-offs and television series based on the franchise, and even long-term plans for a feature film. As of January 2014, there have been over two billion downloads across all platforms and including both regular and special editions, as of July 2015 the series reached over three billion downloads, the franchise has become the highest downloaded freemium series of games of all time. The original Angry Birds has been called "one of the most mainstream games out right now", "one of the great runaway hits of 2010", and "the largest mobile app success the world has seen so far". An animated feature film of same name is also in-development with Sony Pictures, and the first sequel, Angry Birds 2 was released on July 30, 2015. Lead Programmer for the original game and its 2 spin offs: Seasons and Rio.

Find out more

Bad Piggies

Bad Piggies

Bad Piggies is a puzzle video game developed by Rovio Entertainment, and was its first spin-off to Angry Birds. The game launched on Android, iOS, Windows and Mac on September 27, 2012. It was released for BlackBerry 10 in October 2013 and for Windows Phone in April 2014. Unlike the Angry Birds games, the player assists the pigs in building devices that travel on land and air to collect pieces of a map to ultimately capture and take away the Angry Birds' eggs. As of October 2012, Bad Piggies was the fastest-selling game on the Apple App Store, and the quickest one to reach the top of the app list in just three hours. Designed and implemented the whole game core architecture. Developed the core game mechanics in the prototype/pre-production phase. Optimized and profiled the game to the best performances finding the perfect balance between quality, gameplay and support for as many platforms/devices as possible. Managed a total of 5 developers during the whole project lifetime, coordinating and assigning tasks, feature implementations and bug fixing. Main responsible of the entire game codebase. I've been involved in this project since the very early concept phase until launch.

Find out more

Fallin Love

Fallin Love - The Game of Love

Help Fall, a tiny block unnoticed by the woman he loves, in his quest for a disguise that will catch her attention. Guide him by playing with gravity and beat more than 70 mind-teasing levels by collecting cool disguises. Because somehow, each new disguise will bring Fall one step closer to winning her love.

The game is not available anymore on Google Play Store, but you can get the APK here!

Memhurry

Memhurry - The memory game made social

Memhurry is a time based memory game where you can challenge your friends and other people in online matches on the best of 3 rounds. The goal in the game is to match as many pairs as you can before the time ends, trying in the meanwhile to collect special bonuses, using power-up and making big combos that will help you in winning the round against your opponent.

The game is not available anymore on Google Play Store, but you can get the APK here!

Once Upon A Tile

Once Upon A Tile

Once Upon A Tile is an upcoming blend of exploration and turn-based combat divided between two styles of gameplay. One half is exploring the world, by selecting tiles to create your path through levels. Loot, monsters, and secrets are found throughout these stages.

Read the PocketGamer preview article!

Kyubo

Kyubo

Kyubo is a puzzle action game that combines thinking and action. Completing each level will require you both perfect timing when moving or jumping and accurate decision making on how to move the cubes and in which order to disarm traps, enable triggers, access far locations and finally getting to the exit door and move on to the next room.

The game is not available anymore on Google Play Store, but you can get the APK here!

Dungeon Park Heroes

Dungeon Park Heroes

Dungeon Park Heroes is a unique combination of puzzle and rpg game genres. Explore this incredible amusement park built for all the wannabe-heroes, where each underground level and room has been carefully crafted by Grandelf the Green, the most powerful wizard in the Frentanium's kingdom! Avoid deadly hidden traps while opening your way out of each room, pick up treasures often guarded by dangerous monsters, free and unlock more heroes and classes to always have the right hero for the right job and, finally, visit the most well-stocked shop where you can gear them up with unique weapons, armors and magic items!

The game is not available anymore on Google Play Store, but you can get the APK here!

Escape with Words

Escape With Words

The story in this game is that you wake up in a “strange and magical land” where your own words are the ones that could help you overcome obstacles and unlock more areas. It combines standard word puzzlers with adventure game mechanics, but unlike those standard word games, your goal here is to unlock words that create master passwords, or a series of words that allows you to escape “even the most insane situations.” There are 83 challenges with over 300 word puzzles, and a whole lot of strange creatures you can meet in your quest to form more and more of the aforementioned master passwords.

Watch the gameplay video!

Cube Rule

Cube Rule

A simple game concept with only one rule: tap the correct side of the screen to push the cube to the matching colour portal. High speed play gives you a faster, more challenging game, including multiple mind blowing colors that match the intensity of your game play. The kind of game for people who like to be stressed when playing games. :)

Watch the gameplay video!

GeoCannon

GeoCannon

GeoCannon is a momentual online game for real people logged via Facebook featuring territorial challenges fighting for real Cities and it's basedd on unique 3D environment locations and geo-powers, depending on how close players are to the attacked location.
This was a very interesting game concept that back in the days was incredibly innovative (2013). Building the level terrain based on geo data fetched from Google such as altitude, terrain type and texture for literally ANY part of the world was challenging, but incredibly fun!

Watch the gameplay video!

Web Projects

BBAsia Software

BBAsia is an internal software developed using the stack Angular-Node-MySQL used at BestBuying SRL for managing customer orders, shipments, parcels, helpdesk, stock, sales stats and a bunch of other helper tools. This has been a huge project for me and taught me 90% of the things I know nowadays about web software development, since it covers many different aspects of it. It's the most complete solution existing for Magento e-commerce that I've seen around so far.

ARES Software

ARES stands for Acquisition, Retention, Engagement and Socialization. Following these 4 paradigms, ARES is a modular solution of tools for boosting sales at BestBuying. It includes a recommendation system developed using ML algorithms using clustering and sales predicition based on products correlation. The other tools offer a complete customer segmentation and marketing tools for retaining the customers based on their RFM factor and other purchasing behaviors.

Vapy Plugin

This is one of the projects I'm mostly proud of. Vapy is a virtual assistant that is capable of handling different customer requests like their order and shipments status, give them advice on what products are good for them and what not, assist them in case of malfunctioning items and so forth. It uses natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, the libraries were rewritten for NodeJS since the Python ones were not available at that time.

Unity3D Plugins

GlobeKit - iOS Maps for Unity3D Plugin

GlobeKit is an all-in-one solution that provides full access to the iOS MapKit framework from the Unity3D engine.
It has been on the top grossing list of the Asset Store - Integrations category for over 6 months with an average rating of 4.5 stars (20 reviews).

Get it on the Asset Store!

Webkit for iOS - iOS Webviews for Unity3D Plugin

Webkit for iOS is the all-in-one solution to create native iOS WebViews in Unity games.

Get it on the Asset Store!

TouchID for iOS - TouchID iOS authentication system for Unity3D Plugin

TouchID plugin for Unity, allows players to protect their own data or create some fun and alternative game mechanics using the fingerprint sensor.

Other Projects

LiveMesh Augmented Reality

LiveMesh! is an augmented reality application which uses Wavefront objects and a pattern to show your 3D model in a live camera stream.

See it in action

Blender++ Tool

Blender++ is ‘yet another batch renderer’ for the 3D modeling tool Blender, but with one important difference: it’s cross-platform and Windows, Linux and OSX.

Get it on SourceForge

Immersive Worlds R&D

Using Blender with facial-speech recognition and some basic psychophysiological data used in real - time, focusing the attention of how to create interaction between the real world and the BGE, but also how to use cheap technology and an open - source approach to achieve this, making it accessible to a wide range of people in their everyday life.

Check out the presentation at the Blender Conference 2009

Work Experience

CTO & Technical Lead - BestBuying SRL (2017 - Present)

Planning and developing software tools for one of top growing Italian e-commerce company. Building solutions to automate and integrate customer care, packaging and shipment processes between the in-house technology and 3rd party solutions such as Magento and Mautic, as micro-services built on Amazon Web Services. Exploring new grounds of marketing automation, big data and data learning in order to increase customer retention and visits/purchases conversion ratio. Experimenting new technologies, hardware and software, to always be up to date with what the future of the industry will be.

Founder & Lead Developer - Chestnut Games (2012 - Present)

Chestnut Games is an indie game studio focusing mainly on innovation, alternative gameplay and original game ideas. After spending over 2 great years at Rovio where I learned most of the stuff I know in the game development - especially in a commercial perspective - I decided to go back to the roots where I always really belonged: indie games. We develop mostly for mobile platforms (iOS/Android) and to some extent for desktop ones (PC/OSX/Linux) thanks to the awesome cross-platform support that Unity3D - our main choice as game engine - gives us. We released our first game for iOS and Android, Kyubo, on June 6th 2013 and we have a total of 4 titles published in 3 years, with a total user base of 500k players.

Senior Programmer & Team Lead - Topsy Games (2015 - 2017)

Leading the development team, coordinating different departments (art, audio, analytics, business development) and making sure that the whole production is in sync and moving forward as a whole. Interviewing and recruiting people for the development team, building a solid foundation for the newborn company. Implementing core features and services like BaaS services (GameSparks), in app purchases, ads, Facebook, Game Center and Google Play Games, data encryption and storage and AI along with a variety of gameplay elements for an upcoming mobile strategy game.

Senior Game Programmer - Rovio Entertainment (2009 - 2012)

During those 3 years at Rovio, I've been Lead Programmer in Angry Birds Seasons and currently to the new first biggest release since Angry Birds: Bad Piggies. I've been also involved in other projects, being the main developer for half a year of Angry Birds Classic updates and helping out in AB Rio until its launch.
I've been as well prototyping (both with internal tech and Unity3D) and doing several third party technologies integrations.
Responsible for Facebook Connect in game implementation and Location services for the Angry Birds Magic platform.
This is the list of projects on which I worked on:

  • Angry Birds Seasons, Rovio 2010 (Lead Programmer)
  • Angry Birds, Rovio 2009 (Programmer/Lead Programmer)
  • Angry Birds Rio, Rovio 2011 (Programmer)
  • Angry Birds Seasons Free (Lead Programmer)
  • Angry Birds Free (Programmer)
  • Angry Birds Rio Free (Programmer)
  • Bad Piggies, Rovio 2012 (Lead Programmer)
  • Bounce Boing Battle, Nokia 2010 (Programmer)

Senior Tech Programmer - HSE, Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research (2007 - 2009)

Lead programmer in two EU projects, PASION and TARGET. The first was about augmenting communications over the networks, social network studies in other words. In this project I have been responsible for the development of four application in the Collaborative Knowledge Work area. The four platforms on which I developed the applications are: Skype, Outlook, Mobile (Nokia S series and Windows Mobile) and iGoogle-GMail. Those extensions aimed to collect communication data from different protocols and generate social indexes and network graphs on the basis of the events exchanged between users during their normale usage of the different applications. The TARGET project was about games, even if I cooperated in another project which is called FUGA (Fun of Gaming), this is my first experience with adaptative games. An adaptative game is a game that can change itself (difficulty, controls, environment etc) on the basis of psychophysiological data coming from sensors like EKG (Electrocardiogram), EEG (Electroencephalogram) etc. My task was to develop the component which gather data from the sensors to the game over bluetooth connection. I have been presenting PASION applications at the ICT in Lyon in November 2008 and I have took part in several conferences in Finland and Europe. I got also a paper publication at the HCI conference in San Diego (California) that will be held this summer in July. In the spare time I’ve carried out some personal projects mainly using Python, Blender Game Engine and cheap but powerful technologies such as Wiimote, PS3 controller and so on.

Lead Web Programmer - Multimedia Comunicazione (2006 - 2009)

Development of a CMS used by the Web TV “VideoCittà”, one of the first web tv of my county. This CMS does support the upload and pubblication of VideoCittà services, banner advertising control and moreover the management of the Web TV special contents