About

My name is Michael Delva, and welcome to my corner of the web!

I’m a game developer at Fishing Cactus, a Belgian indie game studio, where I serve as Studio Lead Programmer. In that role, I work to align all the teams across the studio around shared tools and processes, and to foster an environment where everyone feels safe to grow, experiment, and evolve. That means conducting code reviews, mentoring junior and mid-level programmers, and being involved in hiring and onboarding new developers. I also drive architectural decisions across projects and take ownership of evaluating and introducing new technologies and middleware into the studio’s pipeline.

On the technical side, I’ve specialized in Unreal Engine since it went open source. Primarily as a gameplay programmer, though I’m equally comfortable modifying the engine itself, and I’ve been a long-time contributor to it.

Over the years I’ve developed a passion for building reusable core game systems — mission, dialogue, asynchronous save — that can serve as solid foundations across different projects.

Console development rounds out that picture: I’ve successfully ported multiple games across platforms and am well-versed in the unique constraints and certification processes that come with it.

Automation and continuous integration are another thread running through my work. I’ve built a Jenkins file generator Python package, several game asset validators, a plugin to review pull requests in the editor, and more.

All of which you can explore on the Projects page.

Outside of code, I enjoy crossfit and running, watching movies and TV shows, reading, and the occasional deep dive into something entirely new — like writing a distributed C++ ray tracer, or a NES emulator from scratch.