A few words about myself:

I was born on the 12th of May in 1978. I’m Hungarian, and I have lived in Budapest most of the time.
I have been influenced by computer games since my early childhood, so there was no question what I wanted to be when I grow up: a game developer of course.


A Commodore +4 was my first computer. Great machine. Sometimes I still play with Saboteur or Mercenary.
My first step to level design was hacking Scramble, and changing the layout of the first level. (I didn’t find where the second was located in the memory…

Around this time, after school I wandered in arcades with my friends. We didn’t have money to play, we just watched pros beating the games. As a result I was planning games for Plus+4, like Carrier Air Wing or Midnight Resistance.

When I got to high school, my parents bought me my first PC, with a 386 processor and a 256 color VGA display. It was heaven.
My first “mod” was some new levels for Wolfenstein 3D. They were known throughout the class.
One day a classmate showed me Imagine 3D, so I entered the magical world of 3D computer graphics… which at that time was mainly built of phong-shaded cube and sphere primitives, but I was mesmerized nonetheless.

And there came the era of a Cyrix 5x86 configuration. I made some Doom levels, but my favourite was Heretic. I brought my computer to my friend, we connected them via a serial link cable, and we played my maps. And Death Rally as well.
By then I moved on from Imagine to 3D Studio 4 which I used to make 3D vehicles to my SWIV clone.

Two years later, when Duke Nukem came out, we started to come together and play it on LAN day and night. I was amazed seeing the new features of the Build engine: zone lighting, wind, warp portals, transparent surfaces, movers, cameras…
I just loved making maps with this great game.

After a while I discovered Quake. When I got my Pentium 133, I had no problem running it. It was a powerful rig, so 3D modeling and rendering moved from being a toy to actually being a useful tool.
When I stumbled upon Lightwave 4, I instantly realized that’s the way I like it. The workflow was intuitive, it was a breeze to render nice chrome spheres, and it knew everything I ever wanted from a 3d app (at that time).
So I had the means to produce 3d assets, but I was till searching for a game where I could put them…

Quake and Quake II was fun, I made a few maps in Radiant, but when I saw Unreal, I forgot about them. It was love at first sight. I started to “decompile” the original levels, to learn how they work. I started to make a single-player quest, though it never saw the light of day.


The real revolution was UT99. With my colleagues we stayed in the office after work, and played on my levels. The pattern was like this: fine tuning the level, testing it, collect the critiques and fine tune again. I learned much during those days.
My work was also interesting: I set up the intranet for the company, and made a java based bug reporting and user support system along with a queue based task manager for the hardware maintenance department. (My high school was IT oriented, so I have a basic programmer degree.)

Then, in 2001, I got a job at a small game developer company. I was working on several projects, as we were making prototypes. That way we were able to experiment, to try out different types of games. We worked with the Terminator 3 and I Spy licenses, and made a proto for a third person beat’em up starring a werewolf. I had a chance to work on games for PC, Xbox and later on for Nokia N-Gage and Tapwave Zodiac.

When I first heard about the MakeSomethingUnreal contest, I knew that this is a great opportunity to make… well… something Unreal: A game, that I can be proud of, where I can show what I’ve learned during the previous few years. With one of my colleagues - Attila ‘Indy’ Malárik - we started to plan a platformer mod with puzzle elements… and MetaBall was born. Making it was 17 months of hard work, but I think it was worth the effort: eventually we were 2nd in Phase 4 and 5th in the Grand Finals.
Indy did all the coding, and I did the modeling, texturing, level and game design, and some MetaBall specific sound effects.

After Metaball, I was invited to work on another mod, called Deathrace. It started as a Carmageddon remake, but later on we deviated from the original game and designed our own version. I managed the design documentation, made two cars and a city map with all the artwork.

6 months after the end of the MSU contest, I had the chance to move to Sydney, to work on a game based on the Stargate franchise. I was employed as a level designer, but I also made a few art assets when artists were overwhelmed.
On a Friday evening I downloaded the trial version of Modo. By then Lightwave started to feel rigid with all the new features duck-taped on an old foundation. The flexibility, intuitiveness of Modo and its underlying modern framework impressed me. I bought the package during that weekend.

After just 10 months, the company I worked for went bankrupt, so I returned to Budapest. I started working on MetaBall 2, which was intended to be a mod for UT3. The unfinished Deathrace also had a sequel (well, sort of…), now stuck in design stage: Atomic Race.

I found another great graphics application: FilterForge, a node based texture generator. I was a betatester and my filters earned me a free copy of the software.

The MetaBall 2 project turned out to be much bigger than I first anticipated, so due to the lack of a team, it got canned, and I moved on.

For a while I was freelancing, until an ex co-worker told me about a job opportunity at a small company: an Unreal based game about a Marvel comics character. It was a great opportunity so I took on the job and we started working on The Punisher: No Mercy.

It was an intense ride, but I did what I like - all kinds of stuff: I helped the team to learn the do-s and don’t-s, the dirty tricks and the elegant workarounds in the Unreal engine. Told the artists everything I knew about normal maps, specular maps, parallax mapping and the like. I designed our weapon, effect and player subsystems. Made half of the maps in the game. Created most of the special effects and shaders. Got my hands dirty with the animation system and programmed a few utility scripts. I helped out the artist with a few models and made almost all cutscenes. But most importantly I was a mediator between different disciplines: I really enjoyed examining problems from the coder’s - artist’s - game designer’s - level designer’s points of view.
Since my first job in the game industry I considered myself a level designer, but recently I realized that my true calling is being a technical artist.

When the Punisher project ended, I prototyped a few of the main features of the company’s next project, but then I decided to leave.
I started working on Neural, a stealth/action/puzzle total conversion for UT3.
(..to be continued.)