Hello!
I'm Joachim 'Acegikmo' Holmér!
I've been interested in the creative aspects of gaming for a long time, starting out with simple level editors, and then went into more advanced ones as I grew older.
I think my first actual game creation thing was Game Maker 6. It was also the first time I coded something, using their builtin GML language.
After that I went into creating custom levels for Unreal Tournament 2004, Serious Sam, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, among others!
Most time was probably spent making Liero mods and Trackmania Tracks though, I even managed to become a moderator in the official Trackmania forums (Apparently I was 14 years old, just looked it up, heh).
I didn't take game creation that seriously until I started becoming more and more involved in TF2 mapping. When people actually started to like the stuff I did, and especially after placing
second in Valve's TF2 art-pass contest, and being
mentioned in the TF2 blog a few times, I got loads of motivation to carry on with game development!
During my TF2 mapping time, I was in a school where I learnt Java and C++ programming and a bunch of neat mathematics (Although most coding was done in my spare time). Of course, there was a bunch of other things you could learn there at school, but I generally didn't care all that much about the things I didn't need to learn to become a game developer.
After that I went to a Game design school called FutureGames, where I met loads of like-minded, motivated people! FutureGames introduced me to Maya, UDK, Unity, which is pretty much everything I use these days.
During FutureGames, one of our teachers (
Sjoerd 'Hourences' De Jong), asked my friend Marko and I if we were interested in joining him in developing free DLC levels for his game "The Ball", so we did! We were excited to join it since we hadn't done anything commercially released at the time, but we were to find out something even more exciting after signing an NDA.
We had accidentally walked in on working with Valve and the promotional campaign for Portal 2! "The Ball" was one of the games to be released into the Portal 2 Potato sack bundle, where every game did something as part of the Portal 2 ARG.
So I worked on that as a level designer and a level artist, I also did some modeling!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HCD97njZxwSomewhere during FutureGames, a team formed to create a game called Unmechanical. It developed further after the 4-week project time was over, and that's where I joined the Unmechanical team.
I worked mostly on Tech-art/shaders, some slight animations, modeling, and environment art. I also designed one of the game's puzzles, as well as created most of the intro (The underground part).
Unmechanical has actually been released now on Steam!You can pick it up for $9 if you want to play it
After FutureGames I went out applying for internship. I started doing Level Design at Avalanche Studios (Just cause 2 developers). Unfortunately I was doing mostly trigger placement and scripting on an unannounced title, which to me wasn't really creative or work that I actually learnt much from. I left Avalanche (Regrettably, the people there were amazing), and started working with Zeal Game Studio, a much smaller studio currently working under Paradox, soon releasing Starvoid and A Game of Dwarves. I work there as a tech-artist/shader coder/modeler/environment artist/animator/level designer, which is very fun!
So that's where I am now!
Currently I'm working hard on a Unity game, which I'll announce later this month!
I'm also making electronic music in my spare time, you can find me on Spotify/iTunes if you do a little search for Acegikmo
Here's my outdated portfolio if anyone's interested!
(It's lacking Unmechanical and my current work, both professional and personal)
www.acegikmo.comLooking forward to posting and lurking around here, haven't done that enough :D
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