About

me...

I was born on the 12th of May in 1978. I'm Hungarian, and I lived in Budapest most of the time.

I was influenced by computer games in my early childhood, so there was no question what I wanted to be when I grow up: I wanted to be a game designer.

A Commodore +4 was my first computer. Great machine. Sometimes I still play with Saboteur, Mercenary or PowerBall.
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... ;)

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 CarrierAirwing 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.

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.

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. At this time I started to experiment with 3D raytracer programs. There was Imagine, and 3DStudio 4. They were cool, but when a schoolmate showed me Lightwave 4, I realized that's the way I like it.

Quake and Quake II was fun, but when I saw Unreal, I forgot about them. It was love at first sight. I was immersed in the world of Unreal. 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 daylight.

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 highschool was IT oriented, so I had a basic programmer degree.)

Then I got a job in a game developer company. I was working on several projects, we were making prototypes. That way we were able to experiment, to try out different types of games. I had a chance to work on games for PC, Xbox and later on for Nokia N-Gage and Tapwave Zodiac. I learned to see problems in many different perspectives.

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 last 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.

Now in my freetime I'm working on MetaBall 2, which is intended to be a mod for UT2007. The unfinished Deathrace also has a sequel (well, sort of...), currently in design stage: Atomic Race.

Modo 2 has arrived, so I have had a great ammount of interesting stuff to learn. It is fun to model, texture, paint and render in Modo. Even when it gets buggy, at least I can script a workaround.

My other favourite graphics application is FilterForge, a node based texture generator. I was a betatester and my filters earned me a free copy of the software.

In 2007 the MetaBall 2 project grew from a one man show to a team effort: now I'm organizing 5 people, doing project management along design work and art asset creation.
I'm also working on the design side of other projects as a freelancer.

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