Hi, I’m Felix - I’m a professional software developer and spent of most of my career in game and/or engine development. I say most because I, during a 3 year apprenticeship, also worked on an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software and, later in my career, on interactive lighting software as part of a contracting job.
How I got into gamedev
I’ve been drawn to games ever since I played on a NES at my friends house when I was in first grade. Soon after getting my SNES for christmas in 1995, I started thinking about how cool it would be to add more games to the system - Secret of Evermore in particular was a game I could not get enough of and it certainly left it’s mark on my gamedev journey.
While I always had access to a PC during my childhood (my dad had a PC with a 486 CPU), I only started looking into gamedev when I got my first own PC sometime in the late 2000’s. It was a AMD Athlon 1Ghz with 128 MB SDRAM + a Riva TNT2, it was a beast!
This machine started my gamedev journey and I began working on smaller 2D RPGs using the RPG Maker 2000. It was basically a game engine + tools specificially aimed to make 2D turn-based RPG games. While I had a blast with this and spent many nights designing my own game (I still have a disc containing a version somewhere), I quickly reached the limitations of the RPG Maker 2000. The games made with it were fixed with a 320x240 resolution and used 16x16 sprites to render the game world. This coupled with the fixed, turn-based battle system eventually turned me away from the RPG Maker and I looked into programming my own game from scratch.
Now, some 20 years later, I only regret not getting into programming sooner and couldn’t be happier with my career choice :)
What to expect from this?
I’ve been thinking of picking up blogging again and thought that now is a good time. I’m planning on mostly writing about software development with focus on native game, game-engine and emulator development with occasional posts about my other hobbies (retro game tech and competitive FPS mostly).