Origins – How skywars Was Born
Birth of a coder
It all started one day when I was 9. I went to my mother and told her I was bored. My mother was a computer science teacher; she pulled the old computer out of the attic running Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS. She showed me how to write a small program in Tubo Pascal and gave me her big books, which I studied. I managed to create a few pretty cool programs, including a first multiplayer game—all without having discovered the internet yet!
First 3D figure
First game – a cubic runner
A triangle, then a cube, then a game
I kept learning on my own: I discovered several languages, did some web development, BASIC, a bit of C++. When I was 17, I got my first Android phone. I immediately installed Android Studio and started coding on it. Then, after graduating high school, I dove into OpenGL. It took me at least a week to get a triangle on the screen. Understanding shaders and matrices wasn’t easy (and it was only much later that I truly understood what I was doing!). I then managed to display a second triangle, a figure made of triangles, a cube—and there it was, I had everything I needed to start a game!
I started by creating a small 3D runner with cubes. You could move forward by tilting the screen, move right and left, and jump using the screen. I had tons of ideas for what was next: make it multiplayer, add power-ups, transformations… but I was starting prépa, and it was time to set the game aside and focus on math and physics!
From “ugly but fun” to “what if we dreamed big?”
I started prépa, and very quickly a few friends and I found an app to play multiplayer on a phone during breaks between classes. We had a mini-game we really liked but that could be improved so much… So I pulled Android Studio back out and set about recreating it! It was much more work than the previous one—just collision handling or energy transfer were full of concepts I hadn’t seen yet. I was able to get help from my physics teacher to understand some of those ideas, and with a lot of persistence I had a pretty decent version by the second year!
We spent most of our breaks on it; I had implemented a multiplayer mode across several phones! I eventually published it on the Play Store. Of course, with zero communication it only got ~100 downloads… And let’s be honest, it wasn’t appealing—the interface was quite ugly!
But when it was roughly finished, at the end of a match I thought: “Okay, I’m capable of doing this. If my only limit were my imagination, what could I create?” And in five seconds I started seeing a world open up before me. I saw airplanes, players facing off, flying bases, futuristic equipment, teleportation, computers, aircraft hacking… I must have spent the entire next class thinking only about that universe!
Second game – circle battle
I was able to really start this huge project in December 2017, with whatever time I could spare—often in chunks of a few hours, a few vacation days (and even a few months during lockdown).
You can find the evolution of this universe on the devlog page.