Simply the story of one developer's journey.

From early childhood, I was literally obsessed with the idea of creating my own worlds. It all started with a simple story of toys. Like all kids, my brother and I rejoiced in the latest plastic figure our parents bought for us. Immersed in the culture of comics, cartoons, and other creative works of that time, we played out the roles of those characters in our games.

Magic fire

Favorite toys started breaking. Their hands and legs were falling off, and that's when the path to creating something of my own, something unique, opened up for me! One day, our uncle, upon seeing another broken toy, showed us a way to restore it! Standing in the kitchen, my brother and I surrounded him, watching the magic unfold – a matchbox, fire, school chemistry, and voilà, melted plastic adhering to the damaged parts. It was amazing; at the age of 7, I literally witnessed a miracle.

How we came up with skins.

As they say, a bad example is contagious, and experiments with the healing fire did not pass us by. Over time, classic superheroes became boring to us. If initially we were restoring broken toys, at some point, the idea came to me: what if we combine the hands of one character with the body of another? It was literally a portal into a world of imaginative flights and experiments. To say that we didn't have a single intact toy since then would be an understatement. Different limbs, experiments with nail polish quietly extracted from Mom's drawer and used as costume paint for heroes, various fabric inventions to create a unique look. I fondly remember that time, which led me to the current point.

The passion for transformations changed its form

Sometime, the story of toys had to come to an end, despite all the effort invested in the image and history of each character. And so, due to our age, at 13, we were forced to interrupt this adventure. For me, an entirely new world opened up – computer games and their modifications.

Modifying well-known games

At that time, we didn't have home internet. All we had to settle for was EDGE via mobile connection, which was not at all suitable for downloading files. Using my 'brick' phone, I would find the best spot for reception in the house and leave the phone there to download new 3D models. After exhausting days of trying to install the downloaded characters in the game, reading instructions on how to do it, and transferring files via USB to the computer, I finally reached the summit! Now I could proudly boast to my friends that I had a unique model in the well-known Warcraft 3.

At the limit of possibilities

Simple goals were achieved, and now I wanted more. The insatiable desire to modify games led me to study programming, graphic software, and when the full-fledged internet appeared, I spent days on forums absorbing knowledge like a sponge. To this day, a significant portion of the skills acquired back then helps me in game development. Finally, I was ready to create something grand, but for the first time, a serious challenge loomed ahead: tackling large projects alone was an impossible task or, at the very least, a crazy idea. So, in a small community on the forum, we started organizing into teams and working on projects together.

At the crossroads

Time passed—the audience for the 2003 game steadily declined. I witnessed projects in the community with dozens of contributors and years of development, yet never reaching completion. The scale of my vision was exactly the same, prompting me to think, 'Is it worth spending so many years on an idea that, at best, only a small circle of people will see?' This entire journey led me to delve into the development of my own games. It all started with an attempt to transfer existing work, ideas, and the storyline into modern development tools. However, ahead of me lay many years of in-depth exploration of this field.