|
I was born on the 4th of October 1979 in
one of the Adriatic republics - Croatia.
Since I was interested in computers as a
small child, a dream of making my own computer
game followed me since the elementary school
days, when friend and I began programming
a small game written in Basic on the Sinclair
Spectrum platform. The game was unfortunately
never finished due to school commitment.
First grasp of the virtual 3D world and
creation within it was thanks to my uncle,
who is an expirienced Lightwave user and
is still working for Croatian Radio-Television
( HRT ) as a 3D artist, Sasa Ilakovac. I started learning
the basics of Lightwave and first results
emerged. I was in love with 3D modelling.
As I went further through the school systems
I found out that the regular education channels
in those days couldn't offer me the knowledge
i was grasping to comprehend - anything
remotely related to any kind of game/artistic
development, except programming, which wasnt
as interesting. Therefore i started learning
various graphic applications by myself since
elementary school and came up with pretty
satisfying results.
First graphic related application I discovered
was Paint Shop Pro, in which I created a
few artworks before I started using and
learning more powerful Photoshop, to which
i transcended and continued working on artworks.
In that period I was mostly getting aquainted
with various tehchniques of creating digital
art, where the first decent art pieces were born.
Next thing that logically came in a row
was level design. It was the Half-Life game
to blame, since it came with a pretty simple
set of level creation tools in which
first attempts of level design started emerging.
First playable level I have created was
cs_haste, a multiplayer level for Half-Life's
modification Counter-Strike. Next levels were de_volare and de_laguna, which were technically more sophisticated and visually more impressive. During this period i learned a lot about game balance and gameplay related issues.
After conquering the Half-Life engine's logics, I found myself in a very
"friendly" environment. I realized
this is what I want to do for living. In
the meantime I got a job as a graphical
illustrator for PcPlay magazine where I
designed cover pages, created illustrations,
artworks and wrote various articles. Working
for PcPlay magazine made possible my further involvement in the game industry and it also opened some web design related opportunities in Croatia.
Since Croatia is not quite "up to the
world game development standards" ( at that time, it had only one affirmed game development
company - Croteam ) I didn't have any chance
for professional exposure until I found
out about Razbor
crew on Legacy:Dark Shadows point & click prerendered 3D adventure game. That was a small and enthusiastic game
development company, in which I soon started
working. After a year, I left the team because i found the organisation inadequate, despite
my vain efforts to improve it. I left the
team and landed a job in DZ
Design where I worked for short period
of 5 months after which i almost immediately
started working for Provox, games department.
Next endevour was working as a part of Metropolitan studio
on some architectural visualisations and on Ucilica project for Markottel d.o.o. where i created various items, characters and scenes.
As most of decent freelance job don't last very long, i found myself working as a Web designer again, this time for Auto-Oglasnik, which lasted for about half a year when Exozet contacted me and invited me to come work for them, which i gladly accepted. I was back in the game.
Working for Exozet was one of best professional expiriences i had so far. I was pleased with the effort and communication german part of Exozet provided for it's croatian subsidiary - Exozet d.o.o. Unfortunately, finding game-development-wannabee's in Croatia turned out harder than we imagined, which was the main reason why Exozet d.o.o. was shut down.
|
