About Lightworks Games

This blog is the story of two guys working to build a game company from the ground up. We’ve given up our regular jobs to pursue a dream and this space is where we’ll talk about our experiences and our journey towards either success or failure.

You can read about what we're doing with this blog here, and read about our story and how we got started here.

Walter Haas

Hi. I’m the resident tech guy here at Lightworks Games. I work on the core engine and make sure our games run as fast as possible. I also collaborate with Tom on the game designs of all of our projects.

Education

I knew that if I was ever going to make computer games then I’d need to know how to code them. So in 1999 I chose to do a combined degree of Bachelor of Information Technology and Bachelor of Applied Science (in Mathematics) at the Queensland University of Technology. In November 2002, 4 days after my final exam, I started my career in game development at a local computer game company called Auran.

Background

I was born in 1981 in Austria (a small country in Europe). Austria has a lot of snow in winter and when we weren’t skiing down the slopes we were inside playing computer games.

A few years later in 1989 we moved to Brisbane, Australia. That’s the country with lots of kangaroos and Steve Irwin. G’day mate! I’ve spent most of my life here and consider myself as Australian as the next bloke. But one of the habits that stayed with me from my days in Austria was playing computer games.

Thomas White

Here at Lightworks Games I'm the lead game designer, tools architect and level designer. I work on our games' concept and feature designs, code our level and theme editors, code any other support applications we need (like this blog and other upcoming websites) and of course create the levels for our games.

Before launching Lightworks Games I completed a year of study towards a Bachelor of Microelectronic Engineering at Griffith University before deciding that I liked software a lot more than hardware, so I switched universities and received a Bachelor of Software Engineering from the Queensland University of Technology. After that I worked as a contractor doing applications programming, and went back to university to receive a Graduate Certificate in Philosophy from the University of Queensland.

All in all it's a great set of skills for making games because it means I can not only explain how Mario jumps on a Goomba's head from a technical point of view, but also *why* :).

As Lightworks Games progresses I look forward to getting our first game out on the market, and to using the experience and technology we're building up to make the development of our subsequent titles both smoother and faster.