Games That Shaped My Journey:
Jackie Chan Stuntmaster
DOOM 2
Mario 64
Resident Evil 4
GTA IV
GTA SA
Kane & Lynch 2 : Dog Days
Half Life 2
Uncharted 2-3-4
Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019)
Days Gone
Hotline Miami
Need For Speed Most Wanted (2012)
BeamNG.drive
Metal Gear Solid GZ & TPP
Artists I always listen to when i hear:
Tame Impala
Radiohead
Jocelyn Pook
Hans Zimmer
M83
Zero 7
AIR
UNKLE
Masive Attack
Juno Reactor
Deftones
Suicide Boys
Metallica
Linkin Park
Eminem
Movies that affected me:
Fight Club
Les Triplettes De Belleville
Bridge to Terabithia
Truman Show
The Game
Ex_Machina
Blade Runner 2049
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
Parasite (2019)
Coherence
Matrix
Animatrix
PONYO
Gemini Home Entertainment
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
DUNE 1-2
Story
Hello, let me introduce myself a little more.
I would like to share my interests, my daily routine, and the things that make me who I am. That way, you can get to know me better.
PRESENT DAY
I am 25 years old, a quarter of a century. Maybe I am wrong, but I feel like this is the age where I can finally say, "Oh, so this is what life is about." Instead of just existing, I am experiencing life and learning about my own expectations.
I am a game developer. In this job that requires a lot of mental energy, I try to improve myself, but at the same time I also spend time on my hobbies to clear my mind.
I watch anime, I work out, I do boxing, and I love jumping rope. I practice yoga and meditation. I have a motorcycle that I turned into a cafe racer. I really enjoy modifying things, including modding games. I like cars. I am also improving my drawing skills, and sometimes I stream while sketching on my drawing tablet.
These days I am someone who has worked at different game companies in the past, but now I spend time as a solo indie developer, enjoying the process of making games while listening to DnB music. In short, I work hard and live life to the fullest.
Not only in my career, but also in life, I have gained experience through both achievements and failures. And honestly, I am happy about that. I have learned my lessons, I am wiser, and I keep moving forward.
WHEN I WAS A KID
One day my very first game console came home, and that was the moment I stepped into the world of video games.
It was a slim PlayStation 1, and with it came an original black-back CD:
MS. Pac-Man Maze Madness. It was a fun game, but not one that left a life-changing impact on me.
It arrived right around the time I was starting to discover life and my creative side. Like every kid, I asked a lot of questions. But maybe I had a different kind of curiosity. My questions slowly turned into thoughts like, "Hey, how could I build this from scratch?" I used to watch Backyard Science and try to make little inventions. That was what I called the strange things I built out of scrap when I was a kid.
I did not really get along with my toys either. Most of the time I would end up breaking them. But it was not like Sid from Toy Story. After playing with them for a while, I would pull them apart just to see the little motors or bulbs with wires inside and try to understand how they worked. I even remember my family getting mad at me because I left no toys, tape, paper, or cardboard untouched at home, haha.
PEEKING BEHIND THE PLAYSTATION CURTAIN
Even though my questions were not always clear, I kept asking them while playing PlayStation too. Things like, "Hey, you cannot go that far because that city is just a picture. Go back, Spidey!" or "Haha, do you see those spectators on the side? They are just paper cutouts, and they keep staring at us."
Of course, today that kind of thing would simply be called an art style. I swear, back then the intro of the FPS game Expert (1996), which I never skipped and always watched before playing, looked like the most realistic graphics in the world to me. It was like RTX enabled, haha.
On top of that, the version we had was the Japanese one, so we played it in Japanese. Thinking about it now, the fact that we could still play and enjoy it shows how well the game was designed.
ONE DAY, A GAME ARRIVED AT OUR HOME
One day we got a new game at home, and later it would become one of the best PS1 games on my list: Jackie Chan Stuntmaster. From that day until now, I have remained a huge Jackie Chan fan.
I should be honest here. I do not want to make it sound like I was some genius as a kid. In reality, I was more like a little monster. I used to climb doors, then jump onto the couches while yelling “Jackie Chaaaan!”
I remember putting the game into the PlayStation and standing in front of the TV, doing kung fu moves while waiting at the loading screen. And then, what did I see... An action-packed intro with Jackie Chan’s real face and expressions, perfectly mapped onto his square-shaped head. But at the end of it, unfortunately, Jackie’s grandfather was kidnapped, and that is where the story moved into the gameplay.
It was the most engaging story-driven beat ’em up game I had ever played. It had impressive graphics, immersive level design, hidden passages, and background music in the Drums and Bass style called DnB, which I would only learn about years later. But the real highlight was the combat. With Jackie, we could fight thugs using punches and kicks, as well as various objects around us. And Jackie moved exactly like in his movies, performing authentic fighting moves.
What made it truly special was this: if you waited at the menu for a while, just like the bloopers and behind-the-scenes clips at the end of his films, a “making of” video would play. That was the first time I saw motion capture technology. Jackie wore a black bodysuit, his face was scanned in 3D, and then his moves were recreated on the computer. The developers were already using this technology in the year 2000 to make a PlayStation 1 game. That was why, when Jackie punched, kicked, or rolled over a table, it looked exactly like Jackie Chan himself.
This was important because back then, when there were very few resources about game development, I had already learned that animations could be made either by hand or with mocap. I also understood that mocap could create higher quality animations, and that scanning technology was used to bring objects into games. Looking back, that knowledge was timeless.
It stayed with me all the way to the present day. In my game dev career, it helped me realize that there is always more than one way to do something, and I could choose the right one. But still, this was not the game that pulled me fully into the world of game development. That would come later... something much, much bigger.
MODDING? WHAT IS THAT?
We had a PS1 console at home, but for a long time no other game console would arrive. That meant I could only play PS2 and PS3 era games much later, or at internet cafes. Since no new console came, and graphics were quickly improving, I eventually stopped playing the PS1 and started spending countless hours at internet cafes instead. At some point, it became clear that instead of spending money there, it was time to get a computer at home.
But the computer we got could only run GTA San Andreas, with its built-in 256MB graphics card on the motherboard. Still, this game opened the door to the biggest cause-and-effect moment of my life. At the time, there were already bootleg GTA mods and videos floating around, but I first saw modding somewhere else. I had seen it firsthand at home.
I learned about modding from my older brother, who had been doing it since GTA 2. He would replace sprites and add new cars to the game. I started doing the same thing with GTA San Andreas. By changing .dff files I could swap models, by changing .txd files I could swap textures, and I even modified sounds, animations, and more. To do this, I used a number of different tools.
Basically, I was fixing things in the game that looked bad or stood out, and making them better through mods. My obsession with modding first spread to Source engine games, and later to many other titles. As I got older, I moved beyond just using tools for import and export, and started working with programs that allowed me to edit textures, animations, and models. That was when I had unknowingly taken my first real step into making games.
GTA 4 ON AN OLD COMPUTER
A revolutionary game had arrived in the world of gaming, and its impact on me would last for years. I remember the day a friend and I heard that GTA 4 had come to a PlayStation café. We literally ran there. I swear, we just pressed our faces against the glass, watching people play inside, saying, “Wow, this looks so real! How can it be this realistic?”
At that time, it was completely unreachable for me. My computer could never run it, and I did not have the money to buy it either. I remember sneaking into the PlayStation 3 section of a tech store just to try it. My God, I had never seen gameplay and physics like that before. I even skipped school just to play GTA 4: The Ballad of Gay Tony, because unlike the base game, it loaded much faster and saved me time. I swear, most of the time I was just bailing out of cars at high speed and studying what I would later learn were ragdoll physics. I would crash into walls to see how the character flew, or run over people just to observe the ragdoll behavior.
When my friend finally installed GTA 4 on his computer, I practically moved into his house. Sometimes I went there just to watch him play.
Unfortunately, the only game I could mod myself was GTA San Andreas. I completely transformed it into GTA 4 with mods: cars, weapons, animations, even the main character looked like GTA 4. But what fascinated me most were the physics... and that was impossible to recreate in GTA SA. Later on, a decent ragdoll mod was released for GTA SA through TrGamer, but it was never perfect. Today it sounds like a joke, but now, in 2025, that very old RenderWare engine has full ragdoll and dynamic car deformation mods. And yes, here I am as a grown man, happy and proud to celebrate that fact, without shame, haha.
That game lit a fire in me. I told myself, “One day, I want to make a GTA 4 that every computer can run!” And that is exactly the dream that pushed me into the game industry.
WAIT, THIS RUNS ON THAT GAME ENGINE?
My computer couldn’t run GTA 4, but I had entered a crazy experimental phase where I was modding games, playing old classics through emulators, and diving into Unity Web Player games online. Back then, if your computer didn’t have Unity Web Player, you simply couldn’t play 3D games. You had to go to the site and download it. But no, I didn’t download Unity v3.x that way. While surfing the web, I stumbled upon an amazing game asset with the extension .package. I thought, "If there’s a program to open .dff or .txd files, there must be something to open this too." Boom, that’s when I downloaded my first Unity. Of course, it wasn’t my very first game engine.
Before Unity, I had dabbled in 3D Rad Game Engine, Algodoo, and FPS Creator x9, tinkering and creating tiny experiments. But the very first “game” I ever made didn’t even come from a game engine. I made it in Microsoft Excel. Yes, plain Excel.
I would carefully place old-school Microsoft clipart inside the cells. Car stickers lined up one below the other. Then I painted the cells to create a racetrack and a finish line, my very first level. Using Ctrl, I selected all the cars and pressed the right arrow key to make them move forward. And here’s the fun part: they never moved the same way. Every time I ran it, the winner was different. I have no idea why, maybe my poor computer was struggling, or maybe it was pure randomness. It was like a tiny chaotic horse race right inside Excel, and I was completely mesmerized.
Looking back, it sounds ridiculous, but that little Excel experiment was my first taste of game creation.
Maybe one day I’ll even start a YouTube channel to share this story and all the other crazy adventures of my life, who knows? So uh, yeah.
2025 August 17, 1:57 AM
