Community Spotlight: Stefan Beller
Stefan’s a major contributor to the Tiled map editor and helped us early on with the Flare exporter. He’s taken that Tiled expertise into Flare, where he’s optimized the main map rendering routines by orders of magnitude. Here’s more about Stefan!
1. Where are you from and what do you do?
I am from North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany and currently I am studying computational engineering master degree. During my studies I learned to like and love free/libre software.
2. What’s your dream game?
I really like games having a good atmosphere such as Gothic 2.
Also I like hack and slay such as Diablo 2. The one thing which kept
me at playing D2 was the fact that you never knew if you had the best
items.
Hint: See current discussion about flare items/loot
The same applies to Gothic 2, you always found out another way to handle some quest, sometimes you could see it was unintended by design 😉
3. What drives you to contribute to Flare?
The graphics and art.
Flare is very promising specially at the art, so I can try to help out
at other requirements to be done to make it a great game.
So as of now I did not contribute new features, but rather fixed bugs and rewrote subsystems for speed.
4. Any advice for people who are interested in making games?
- Start small.
- Don’t loose motivation even when you’re stuck at a hard problem, but rather
- Discuss with others. Better yet:
- Join existing projects/communities.
5. Are you involved in any other interesting projects?
Originally I started contributing to The Mana World, which is
a MMORPG, but I don’t like playing quests made by myself on maps
made by myself. So I switched to the supportive projects in the background, such as the Tiled map editor, which is also used by flare developers. That’s how I actually got in contact with flare iirc.