Simply out of interest and by playing around with Android Studio I developed (~5 months) an arcade version of the famous 2048 Tile pushing game. In the main mode of 2048 Apex you have to gain Stars, but to get them you have to make thoughtful moves. It got more and more features: 3 game modes, 46 Challenges, hexagonal board, user Seed, color themes, landscape and portrait support, tablet support, and leader-boards. I love working with Android Studio, it is an amazing powerful IDE. Playstore: Free / Premium.

Starting in 2012 as a Prototype, with a very small team, we laid the foundations for the Free-To-Play game Dreadnought. For a while, we were struggling with the flight controls until I was adding a movement system that was based on physics forces combined with a WASD-shooter-like control schema, which made Dreadnought easily accessible for everyone. To visualize the damage on the ships persistently I integrated a Hit-Mask for impacts, based on the Unreal Engine 3 implementation but much more powerful: Impacts can have glowing edges and special repairing effects. I was responsible for the weapon system, which had to be replicated to the server for validation. A ship can hold up to ten or more weapons per group and with 16 ships in a battle, the amount of replication and the performance hit with all the projectiles was a challenge. I also did a lot of Gameplay coding for the different game modes and improved the Gamepad controls for PS4.

Working on one of the biggest triple-A-title produced in Germany was a very intense experience. Published by 2k in 2012 this game was not hitting the expected marks in the first 3 months, even so, it was extremely well-received (constant over 93% on steam). But over time – while other games of that period got forgotten – Spec Ops: The Line was growing. Today it is one of the cornerstones of modern storytelling in a video game and it added with the “phosphor-scene” a cultural meme to the genre. In this project, I was working on post-processing volumes for adding sandstorm effects,  implementing a rendering mode for blending static cube-maps with dynamic rendering targets for faster reflection rendering. I also added a decal clustering system, an achievement manager, and a lot of Gameplay features like the blood HUD feedback with the shaders and dynamic fog volumes for grenades.

To write a book was a long desire I had and it was soaring in me once in a while. But for a long time, I did not had the patience, the skill, and the story strong enough to keep me going. Around 2008 I got interested in philosophy, sociology, and economy. I was reading a lot of books and was watching a lot of documentaries on those topics. One morn I got a strong image in my head of someone waking up at a huge waterfall. First I did not know what I should do with this, but slowly a story was growing in me. A story was so strong that I had to write it down and I had to grow with this enormous task that took me over 4 years. Of course, new strong images were rising and a new story was forming in my head about a world where huge bridges are traveling over an ocean … and right after I was finishing my first novel I was starting my second. On the way to self-publishing my book I learned a lot about CSS, Adobe Muse, Adobe InDesign, Fonts, and web design.

To create a "boxed-title" just in one year of production with a very small team was a challenge. We agreed that we could not rely on just the big name. The game itself should be fun to play and the quality had to be as high as we possibly could make it. I was responsible for vehicle physics. I added a ghost system for the best lap. I also did a lot of Gameplay scripting and coding and helped out with some AI work.