Hey everyone!

This is an archival post to summarize my work prior to 2007. Sadly most of it has been lost while moving. I used to back them up on CD’s and even had a large collection of early TGC – Nvidia Con FPSC releases. Most of the older ones will simply be a short description. I am aware that this is not interesting to the few of you reading this but I feel like it needs to be on here for completion sake.

Never Lived Dreams

2004/05

My first “serious project”! Ha! The nostalgia. I even finished it and burned it on CD to distribute it around my school. (I was in my early teens at the time so these are my very beginnings.) So if you happen to read this and still have a copy… hit me up, you marvelous creature!

It was a survival horror story with a delightfully sappy story about 2 teens attempting to escape a mental asylum. Where illegal experimental bio-weapons have turned everyone else into Zombies!! While the story was tremendously generic, I did manage to include some pretty involved stuff for the time.

It was made in RPGMaker2000 (or was it 2003) and had a realtime, in-level combat system and “light overlays” pictures that would simulate illumination.

I’m a little proud of having developed this at such an early age and am saddened that I no longer have even a screenshot of it.

Transition

I’ve had a lot of fine developing with a friend at the time but our future projects where either not very good or generally too big to even be possible for our means.

As time went on I’ve bought FPSC from the game creators. It was a pretty basic tool before the community and its updates made it the unique piece of software it became later.

There is little left from my first games. I remember one that was exorcist themed but most of them even I forgot. The software itself (FPSC v1.0) was also plagued with stability issues and so all I had was a tinkering hobby that never amounted to anything until I later joined the german FPSC community. While I’ve had quite some attitude problems at the time I did manage to make a little bit of a name for myself there and even pioneered a lot of techniques and effects around texturing, shading and level design.

Nocturne

2005

A game with a title already taken, Nocturne was a horror adventure with a lot of influence from movies like indiana jones. I have fond memories of designing it but I am convinced that it would just be extremely campy would I still have a copy of it. All of the work I spent on it was lost in a harddrive crash, alongside most of Lunar Crisis.

Lunar Crisis

2006

Lunar Crisis was my very first science fiction game and there is little to summarize. I’ve been too inapt at the time to deliver anything of the scope this project had promised. It got canned due to too much frustration and later rewritten into Symbiotic.

Nightmare

2006/07

Nightmare was somewhat of an elegic creepy adventure game. I think the fact that this was around the first time I ever really saw hospitals from the inside and being rather struck by the incredible sadness and despair these places can emit that I felt like expressing that through this game. None of it would have worked as the idea was to tell the story, mostly centering around a guy waking up in a hospital after an apocalyptic event, through only images, sounds and mostly levels with nothing going on.

A walking simulator as they are often released today.

I was trying to get the levels as believable as possible and even thought I did back then. Looking at them now, they are cringeworthy but hey! It was a good learning experience.

This was also the first 3D game where I made somewhat proper use of lightmapping scenes.

At least I still have pictures:

Fall of Gaia

2007

A big title where I started to grasp the concept of game design. I’ve spent a lot of time on it but never managed to get anything right. The tool wasn’t there at the time and neither was I but I believe it was the first game I at least knew what I was doing and was almost able to get what I wanted.

Fall of Gaia was another rather eeriee story. This time playing on an abandoned crystal mine on a deserted planet. It had a lot of fantasy elements and was supposed to later evolve into this weird, introspective and fairly esoteric story. I’ve had no means to tell this caliber of plot at the time but hey! I tried.

A lot of the work and design ideas later went into the Scifi Shavra games. In this game I experimented a lot with shader effects. It was the last game that was entirely restricted to the german forums. After that my games gained more exposure.

The following title was GTFO which was also released on the interantional TGC boards.

This concludes my little “origin story”. Thank you very much for reading.

-Wolf