A small introduction beforehand
If you don’t care about my backstory, just skip to the next part…(coming soon!)
I was a gamer all my life. School was a horrible place, mainly due to the messed up people I had to deal with in there. So I retreated into gaming worlds and found my passion there. Level Design!
From a very young age I started to create game worlds from scratch and created maps for all kinds of games: Age of Empires, Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Age of Empires 2…a long list of RTS games.
My favorite example, although I lost all of it, was a Starcraft campaign, that took months to develop. It had its own story line, characters (one of them is also the main character for Santa Feeniks) 10 maps with their own little story events etc. It took a “good” SC player around 13hrs to finish the whole thing. I was so proud of myself, it was a masterpiece (for a 12 year old). A couple of months later I lost it all when my hard drive started burning…RIP…and no copies made…
Then came Unreal and more importantly in 1998: Unreal Tournament.
A game I played obsessively, both alone and with friends on LAN parties. And by some random accident, while browsing in the game directories, I found a file called EDITOR.EXE. My eyes went big, a smile appeared on my face and a burning sensation started in my heart.
I sat day and night on learning how to use this damn editor, because back in the days of Unreal Engine 1, there was barely any help, no Static Meshes (the UE name for imported 3D models) and this whole thing was obviously very much different than working in 2D.
But I was determined to learn, so I just tried all kinds of stuff, created very basic block levels, and slowly build up to a fundamental knowledge about the Engine and what you can do. For many years to come, I worked on maps for UT1 and, with more success, UT2004, which by then had the Unreal Engine 2, which had Static Meshes, so I could use the UT game assets to puzzle together my own maps.
My maps being a hit on every LAN party, my confidence was boosted and the plans for my future were made. I wanted to become a Game Developer, a Level Designer, a creator of worlds!
Sometime in 2006 or 2007 I started to think about what to do with my life and how to approach my dream. I was in the military service at the time and was looking to apply for universities for IT specialization. I wanted to become a Game Developer, so going into IT direction was a good start, I already oriented my majors in high school towards this goal.
But then you read that IT in university is a super boring topic and about 60% of the people quit because it is not what they expected. So I got discouraged and stopped looking for a good place to study towards IT jobs.
At the same time, a German game magazine started a new project that was focused on Game Development. And right in the first edition was an article about studying Game Design. So there was my chance. The only problem: no government funding and extreme high fees per month to study in those rare places (Game Design was not at all a common topic in the German school system). There were 3 schools in Berlin that offered Game Design as a course, each of them were demanding a monthly fee of ca. 800€. So my hopes were crushed. I had a good amount of money saved up from my service time, but it was not nearly enough.
So I talked to the only person who could help me now: My dad!
He is somewhat of a financial genius and helped my brothers with ridiculous ideas already…so I thought why not give it a try. We sat together for days calculating what is needed and talking about how to get the money. In total I needed about 30.000€ to
get into the course
move to Berlin
don’t starve!!!
One month before the course we picked started, in November 2007, my dad told me that is impossible to get the funds and that I would have to either wait or go for another direction to study. Obviously this was a major set back and I was crushed beyond anything. A few days went by and I had given up hope when my dad came to me and said: “Son, I might have found a way!” (I am sparing you the details here, it was a rather long journey to many banks, many talks…).
I did not want to get my hopes up, but I listened to him and we both agreed that it is worth a shot. So we applied for a student credit with our bank that had promising values in a sense of interests and payback time. The money for the course itself was paid by my dad in full directly, so the student credit was to get me through the “not starving” part.
After the funding was done, we had to get me an apartment in Berlin, so I started looking and found some promising places near the school. We drove over and visited those apartments. A couple bad ones, a couple good ones, and then there is the place I was meant to stay in for a very long time! My new Home, my very first apartment, I moved in on the 13th of October 2007!
And so began my time at QANTM Berlin
For 18 months I was to learn how to be a game designer. To learn 2D and 3D art, animation. Story and quest design. Audio and video editing. And many more things.
But for me the obvious focus was on 3D and level design. the first few weeks were all kinds of stuff that was interesting, but I couldn’t wait to start with 3D. And at some point my time has come, we learned the first program: 3ds Max, the worst program in my opinion. I had so many difficulties with it, the version we were using was far away from any other program in the 3D business, like Maya or XSI. But I learned the basics and what is important in 3D modeling and texturing.
After a few weeks we moved on to Maya and later we had a look at XSI (now Softimage). And XSI was my GOTO. It was super easy to use, had all the tools I needed and I quickly established a very quick and good workflow to do all kinds of things I wanted to test and learn.
During my time at QANTM and the time after I made a couple of 3D scenes for fun projects with my fellow students. For example 2 fighting arenas for a BeatEmUp game. The first picture shows the Olymp and the second a bathhouse.
This was part of our final project and was a lot of fun. I especially took a lot of pride in the water shader of the Bathhouse, as it was mirroring all its surroundings, which took quite some effort to create. I also learned a lot of differences between Game Art and Movie Art (Real Time and Offline rendering). Our 3D teacher was from the movie business, so his knowledge was very limited when it came to real time rendering techniques, which gave me a lot of trouble especially for lighting static and dynamic objects inside the scene. But with a lot of Google searches, I figured it out (and the term Lightmap UV burnt itself into my brain).
After I graduated from QANTM I worked on a few small things every now and then, but I was already highly engaged in my new job as a Games Tester (hired directly by one of our teachers right after school).
After spending a certain time on those last two projects I really disliked my progress and stopped for a while…until my passion flared up again and I tried something different. Create a scene, but on a much smaller scale, not intended for a game, just as a form of showroom.
I was very happy with this little project, so I moved on to planning bigger things…