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MORE ABOUT ME

So this whole page is a chance for me to ramble little bit more myself for posterity. I cover aspects about myself, and my own personal journey to professional game development. These sections may be a little long-winded...I guess I'm inspired after reading the memoirs of greater game devs such as Sid Meier and Jordan Mechner. Reading and watching retrospectives of game developers past really pumps me up to further my own career! Whose actually going to read through this section anyway? At this stage, it's still incomplete...

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MY NAME

My full name is Conrad Pascal Buranicz.  I like telling people that my middle name comes from the programming language, but it actually from the 16th Century Saint.  My parents are both immigrants from Poland, and that's where my last name comes from.

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My Great Grandfather was named Conrad. Starting in preschool, my brother Patrick and I had a next-door neighbor named Robbie.  Our neighbor called us Pat and Con.  The three of us were Pat, Con, and Rob.  Around 4th grade, I tried going by Con, but I remember Mrs Defeo, the homeroom teacher, didn't like that one bit (but Matt, Mike, etc were fine...). By middle school though I stuck to my guns and went by Con, turning in my homework like that! However, to avoid all the puns (Conman, Con Artist etc)  I added an extra N to my name circa seventh grade.  My brother started writing his name as Patt. So we were now Patt and Conn through high school and college!

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For my professional career, most people call me Conrad. That's what it says on my nametag, and I never try too hard to make Conn stick. So, professionally I guess I go by Conrad, but my friends call me Conn!

Full Disclosure:: I added this section about my name here because I really struggled with whether or not I should put my real name or nick name in the credits of the games I worked on.  My Leads put down Tim and Will etc, should I follow suit I thought? End of the day, I decided to use my full name, but I have this little section here as a concession. 

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SPOKEN LANGUAGES

I wouldn't call myself a "Polyglot", but strangers have been "surprised" when I switched from Japanese to Mandarin on my flight from Narita to Shanghai.  So, in this "More About Me" section, I'd like to explain further about the languages I speak. 

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So to be clear: I'm NOT fluent, but I'm, at least, at limited-working proficiency with these three languages. I don't consider Spanish a language I can speak at all, despite being taught it in Middle School and High School.  There's a temptation to tell people you're learning a new skill prematurely, and hiding the 'bragging' with 'false modesty.' Am I falling into the trap now? I hope I've crossed a 'learning threshold' where I can talk about it a little; show this linguistic side of me.

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So to start with Polish; my parents are from Poland, and the vast majority of my extended family live there. We were exposed to Polish our whole life through Polish television, Super-markets, and the Polish families in DuPage County where we grew up.  We were never sent to Polish Language School, so our Polish was never as refined as Polish American Kids our age (particularly reading/writing).  The Polish aspect of my life has definitely dwindled, but I still get very proud when Polish-developed games like The Witcher and Robocop: Rogue City are released!

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I "accidentally" started learning Mandarin when I was working for Sanzaru in the Bay Area. Several of my co-workers were from Mainland China and Taiwan, and I started learning phrases "for fun."  To my astonishment...learning Chinese was "easy" especially in the grammar department, so I took learning more seriously. It felt like I was progressing in Chinese faster than I was in my game-dev skillset. 

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I feel there's some stigmas with learning Japanese; and I was reluctant to learn because of "shallow" reasons like for consuming pop culture.  In 2019, I started studying Japanese because I wanted to directly communicate with our bosses without needing a translator. 

 

Going on vacation, and being able to communicate with folks is thrilling: every new phrase you learn "unlocks" new dialogue trees and it becomes quite addicting.  It also takes alot of time to push past the walls, continue to challenge yourself with new topics etc. I'm no good at passively learning, I have to actively try and speak new phrases. Anyway, that's why I have these posted on Linkedin.

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MY ROAD TO MAKING GAMES

EARLY YEARS

(THIS ENTIRE SECTION IS WORK-IN-PROGRESS PLEASE KNOW ITS RAMBLINGS AT THIS TIME, BUT I APPRECIATE YOU READING ANYWAY!)

 

Here, I'd like to tell my story of what I was doing as kid that led up to becoming a professional game developer. Its fun to reflect (and also cringe) on my path from grade school through college. It went from pretend games to Game Maker, then XNA and beyond.

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Note: when talking about my past: I'm very nervous of sounding pompous. I don't want to come across as delusional like James Rolfe and his over "500" films. Nothing I did as a child was special at all.  Most folk probably have similar stories of playing pretend etc as kids. As for my drawings, and early "game" projects: its just normal, poorly-done stepping stones. Everyone has to go through "cringe" projects in order to grow! So disclaimer: none of the projects below are profound or impressive: its just a catalog of my journey!  Thanks to folks like Chris Alaimo for inspiring me to share these tidbits.

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Our Dad purchased my older brother and I an NES second-hand from a Mall in Rolling Meadows, IL in 1992.  Videogames became my main obsession ever since.  When I was four years old, I declared I wanted to be a "Videogame Maker". And so "my whole life" I only wanted to make games. So, especially for these early years, I don't have much "evidence" like home-movies or drawings to back up my stories. Some of these stories may be apocryphal; events that have replayed in my head year after year (potentially mixing with other memories).   

 

Before anything, my first inkling of "game making" was playing pretend as if we were inside a videogame.  I recall the first pretend video game as "Battle." My brother Patt, neighbor Rob, and I would "fight" on our parents' bed as different video game characters. I remember us being Cutman and Gutsman from Megaman, the game our neighbor just introduced us to. It's a running theme that whatever new game or show we were exposed to:: we'd make a pretend game out of. 

 

Being very little kids, we had two types of pretend games: we called them "Us" and "Oneofmygames."  Yes, that's how we labeled them.  "Us" was a bizarre serial story where Patt and I each lived separately with our stuffed animal clans (come to life in the story). He had a bunch of teddy bears we called "The Mishas" (Misiu in Polish means little bear). I, on the other hand, had a bunch of plush cats we called "The Meowies"

 

Anyway, on the flipside, "Oneofmygames" was essentially us role-playing a videogame, with me almost always being the DM of sorts. Through imagination, we transformed our living room into Mushroom Hill or dungeons from Zelda.  We'd fight bosses, even create "instruction manuals" for how to beat the pretend game.

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In terms of my "game career" early childhood was just about absorbing all this pop culture (games, movies, cartoons etc) and occasionally drawing and playing pretend games.  In 1998, Goldeneye became our obsession, and we turned our friend Troy's basement into brand new Facility mission to sneak into!

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MONSTER LAND

When you're a little kid (before Web 2.0) its very easy for many good games to pass you by. We didnt have older siblings or cousins to expose us to Ultima or Phantasy Star. So it wasnt until the late 90s that we really got absorbed into RPGs. In particular: Breath of Fire 3 was a shockwave for me.   

 

Because of RPGs, 3rd Grade is when Patt and I made up "Monster Land" a series that would stick with me for the rest of my life in one way or another.  At first, "Monster Land" was our derivative of the "Collect Monster" genre: a mismash of Pokemon, Digimon, and my new favorite obsession Dragon Warrior Monsters.  The "Oneofmygames" for "Monster Land" had you choose between three starting monsters:: Dongo the Mountain Dragon, Rap the Tunnel Snake, and ChiChi the Blue Wadabou...it's not difficult to deduce where my childhood-self was "inspired" by.

 

Monster Land didnt just fade away, it continued as myself as a kid became more ambitious.  In 4th Grade, inspired by Harry Potter, Narnia, etc I wrote an "epic book" of Monster Land, based on our pretend games.  It hand-written on 103 loose-leaf pages, and I planned a seven-part saga!

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Moving into Middle School, I was getting more and more sophisticated with my creative endeavors.  I was making my own "books" and drawing my own "comic books"as concessions...but they weren't actually making games: my true goal. But how do you go about making videogames?? It was complete mystery to me. As a young kid, I pictured "Videogame Makers" as adults in factories screwing microchips into game cartridges. Like I said, some people had Uncles or older brothers who exposed them to bedroom coding or even just Doom WAD files. However, growing up, I didnt have access to that info. 

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Our household got the internet pretty late, the year 2000 with NetZero ISP. Using dial-up, we'd excitedly visit Gamespot and wait for jpegs to load introducing us to new releases, or older games we've never heard of.  Surfing Gamespot is how I discovered my breakthrough: "RPG MAKER" on the PS1. Holy smokes:: after all this time, I could finally create my own RPG! It wasn't until many months later that I finally got my hands on it. It was very cumbersome, limiting but by golly "The Black Rod" was my "first" real game project. RPG Maker exposed me to Event Scripting and Resource Management (had to get creative using so few presets). It was a great first stepping stone, but I still just count it as my "early years".

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GAME MAKER 6

I'm now finally at the part where I discuss me "developing" actual videogames! Around December 2004, we received Issue 188 of Electronic Gaming Monthly (marked Feb 2005 Issue). Inside, there was an article titled: "Back to the Beginning." The article was about fan "demake" projects of famous series from around the internet. My interest peaked and I visited the urls that the article posted. MP2D was a community fan project attempting to convert Metroid Prime into a 2D "Super Metroid"-esque version. On the website's sidebar there were affiliate links and portals. That's where I found GameMaker.  Finally: a program that will let me make whatever game I want! 

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Except for RPG Maker, I never had knowledge or access to such a tool. I was besides myself. So, in December 2004, during Christmas Break, I followed the tutorial and created "Catch That ChiChi"  a derivative of the 1st Game Maker Tutorial.  I was so proud, showing my family.  The next day: I attempted to create a more sophisticated "game" called "ChiChi's Strawberry Game" where our Monster Land character ChiChi would try to collect as many strawberries as possible. Of course, I didn't know what I was doing: I couldn't get ChiChi to STOP moving, my 2nd project became more of a pac-man game because of my own limitations. The Drag-n-Drop interface, everything was new to me, but very empowering. Sadly, both of these two early projects are lost to time (as I'll explain later on)

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CHICHI TO THE RESCUE

This is it: my first "true" videogame project. I didnt want a platformer to be my first "real"project: but that's how it turned out.  I myself even thought the title felt like a 'side game.'  I wanted my first game to be an RPG, something  top-down. My ambitions were bigger than my capabilities.

GameMaker 5.6 had real comprehensive platformer tutorials (iterating over six files) and that's how "ChiChi to the Rescue" came to be. The title still feels so odd to me. The game was highly derivative of those Platformer Tutorials.  I really had no idea what I was doing. But I tried, man I was obsessed. I remember trying to obsessively figure out how to get ChiChi to have the Wings Power Up. I couldn't figure out how to "turn on" and "turn off" gravity, so I settled for a High Jump.  Conditionals were new to me....Variables were new to me.  I didnt realize I could declare my own variables, so I ended up using HSpeed as the variable for "Wings Enabled"  As a side effect, ChiChi couldn't move horizontally...I tinkered and toyed around with everything. For the third boss Anchor, I used Paths. Splines were brand new to me, but man it made the Boss feel like it had AI as it moved in an erratic pattern I layed out.

Man, I remember January 2005, sitting on the floor of my carpeted bedroom. My Dad set it up for me so that our Compaq Presario was outputting to my 19" Panasonic TV via Composite output. Seeing my game run on a 'regular' television was just about the coolest thing.  There I was sitting on the floor after school spending half a day drawing the Intro Splash Screens. Things happened so quickly (because the game was so simplistic).

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From after a little more than a month, February 2005, I created a whole "game" with five levels and five unique bosses!  Believe it or not, people in 8th Grade were very impressed. We would play it on the Homeroom computer during indoor Recess because it was too cold to go outside.  I began selling the game: $2 for a burnt disc with the Executable on it! Guess what: for $5 I would insert YOU into the game. I would sprite-swap ChiChi with a self-insert of your character.  I even got three takers! I ended making an Upgraded Version that featured two Cheat Codes (SKIP for Level Select and BLUE for replenishing lives). At the time it truly felt like I was a game developer now and on my way to becoming a professional!  Funny how quaint it is now. Heck, Ken Silverman or the Oliver Twins were doing ALOT more impressive things at 14 than I was. Anyway, I didnt know that stuff, I was on top of the world!

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In college, I revisited alot of my GameMaker projects and updated them. After learning real programming (C++, C# etc) I felt INVINCIBLE coming back to GML and Drag-n-Drop scripting!! I made alot of tiny changes to "ChiChi to the Rescue." I fixed the art here and there, I fixed many major bugs with ease. ChiChi could move with the Wing Emblem, he automatically moves WITH the mobile platforms, the entire game is easier. I George Lucased the whole thing!! And yes, this is the version I'm posting online for you all to try. Crucially, I set the entire project to run at 60 Hz and for the resolution to be a consistant 640x480. Back in 2005, the aspect ratio and view size changed from Room to Room. Sadly, I never realized what a big problem that was until college. TO BE CONTINUED

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THE FORGOTTEN MIRROR

It was around March 2005, barely three months after I started using Game Maker and I was the "big shot game creator" in middle school.  I wanted to do something much more ambitious! Sadly, my second game is lost to the ages...our Windows 2000 Compaq Presario's Harddrive failed...this would not be the last time I permanently lost my data (more on that later).  Luckily, I had "ChiChi to the Rescue" because of all the EXEs floating around. For the longest time, I thought I would never to be able to edit ChiChi again. Eventually, I discovered a GameMaker Decompiler that let me do just that.

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Anyway, back to my 2nd game. Actually, originally I wanted to create a series of 'small' mini games. I was really proud of the two Bonus Stages in "ChiChi to the Rescue" so I attempted to create a Tetris-like puzzle game. I abandoned that very quickly...I had NO idea what I was doing. I moved on to what I consider my 2nd real project:: "Monster Land and the Forgotten Mirror" a co-op, top down Zelda clone using my childhood "Monster Land" characters. The scenario was supposed to take place between the 3rd and 4th "books" of the Monster Land saga. All the sprite-work was custom...partially because I didnt realize I could copy-paste sprites into GameMaker's Sprite Editor tool. Many total-cringe beginer's mistakes: for example, I duplicated the Rooms for each direction that the Players could enter. So yes, if a dungeon had four doors...thats four rooms. TO BE CONTINUED

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MEGA BROS

The summer of 2005: I just graduated 8th Grade, and I was doing two things: working as a janitor at my soon-to-be high school, and creating Mega Bros. I mentioned before I did NOT want to make platformers...I wanted to make an RPG...but I guess after the debacle of The Forgotten Mirror, I fell back to what I already accomplished: but this time I'd get much more ambitious! Patt and I were big fans of Megaman ever since Robbie introduced us to the first two games. Megaman 3 was the first game I ever purchased "with my own money." But the release of Megaman Anniverssary Collection really got Megaman into my brain at the time.  Originally I envisioned a co-op megaman-like with big 16-Bit Sprites. Two brothers "power ranger" into their mega forms when a meter filled up.  The co-op, the transformations, the final boss, the SNES graphics...all of it cut. My ambitions creeped up again. Anyway, that's why the Player appears helmetless. TO BE CONTINUED

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THERES ALOT MORE BETWEEN 2005 to 2009. Only four years wow, but back then it felt ALOT longer...TO BE CONTINUED

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COLLEGE: GAMEDEV DEGREE

Its so funny, I hated  math during middle school and high school. I wasn't any good, and my teachers were old, stuffy ladies teaching math for the sake of math. Once I started programming though...I loved it, and lamented very much that I took Statistics instead of Calculus during High School. Well its not my fault, these teachers didnt tell us how learning Vectors and "Soh-Cah-Toa" would be used daily with game graphics. Its all about seeing applied examples, and I just didnt have much exposure

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After all that, finally, from four years old to eighteen years old, I'd be heading off to university to become a "real" game creator. It almost felt like cheating...going to school to make games instead of "regular school" curriculum like history, physics, or math. But it turns out, all those subjects could be directly applied to game dev who knew?!  I wanted to go to the game-famous DigiPen Institute of Technology, but my parents really hammered in not getting into debt, so I stayed local: DePaul University.  Thanks to scholarships and working while in school, I graduated debt-free! I have alot of mixed feelings with time at DePaul that maybe I'll write about later. I definitely believe the quality of education has alot to do with how much legwork you put in yourself. Anyway, I got to meet some really great teachers that really got me to step-up my game!

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DePaul was based on 10-Week Trimesters, and the first semester, my only game related course was a sort of "Intro to Game Design" centered around the textbook Rules of Play by Zimmerman and Salen. It was very academic, and our teacher was a Grad Student named Jason Pecho, who was one of the first students to have gone through DePaul's brand new Game Development program. I was just so darn happy to actually be going to school for gamedev! Our final project was to create a board game. It's real funny, most teams, including mine, ended up making very videogame-like boardgames. The most inspired team boardgame was sort of a reverse Elevator-Action.

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NOW YOU SEE ME NOW YOU DONT

For Winter Trimester, GameDev I was supposed to be next "real" class. However, it was centered around learning GameMaker, and I already inched through four years of progress!  I got in touch with the teacher Andre Berthiaume through email.  He gave me criteria for how I could "examine out" of the class and skip to Game Dev II.  To accelerate the pace, I took sprites from my abandoned Zombie game "The Forgotten and the Dead" and the gameplay from Ikargua, which we obsessed over after getting a used Dreamcast to commemorate the 10 Year Anniversary. (Wow 10 whole years old...lol). And the result was Now You See Me Now You Dont. Very quick turn-around, but it got the job done for...

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MONSTRA CITY

Game Dev II introduced me to the XNA Framework. I remember reading about the format on Gamasutra in High School.  It was my first time ever using a "real" programming language, and I dont count Visual Basic or GML. Andre Berthiaume was the professor and he created the Iridel Engine, which was a wrapper for XNA 3.1 with Game Loop, rendering structure etc already in place! Now this was a real class!  I thought Andre was the greatest, and XNA felt so far beyond anything I did with GameMaker.  The class started with adding a Model, and moving the camera around in 3D-Space. It was my first time using Autodesk Maya, modeling and texturing. New terms like Vertices and Normals...oh my!

 

Our second to last project was to create a game in two weeks solo. My project was Monstra City. Taking the train to Chicago and walking through downtown during a foggy wintery morning: I had this striking vision: of a skeleton slowly emerging out of the fog and walking towards me. That was the inspiration! Well...that and games like Elder Scrolls, Resident Evil 4, and especially Borderlands...which was the hot new game. So my idea was to create a "Poor Man's Boderlands."  It's funny one of my classmates Mirza Biag was creating a "Poor Man's Star Fox"

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Man, I peppered Andre with emails mercilessly. I wouldnt have been able to create the project without him and especially Iridel doing most of the 3D Math. I had no idea how to handle Compiler, and certainly not Linker errors.  I niavely had my Sniper Scope "Zoom In" by simply jumping the Camera Forward 50 Units and then 50 Units back when done zooming. Andre set me straight! I recall people having unkind things to say about him outside of class, but I think thats just because he expected results. I feel like my teachers at DePaul had that. It wasn't just busy-work, easy-A. 

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For the class Final, we got into groups of four and were supposed to improve upon one of our projects. In my team, MonstraCity was chosen because it was the most "polished". And so we spent another two weeks expanding the game; new enemies, a new dungeon, cut-scenes, and a boss battle!  I was taken aback that Andre designated me a programmer, wow!  Meanwhile, David Henry was an older guy (maybe only ten years older, but felt large at the time).  To me,he felt like a wizard in Autodesk Maya. He ended up making the cut-scenes and modeling the Apartment: which I was just blown away by! Meanwhile, I threw myself into making a huge Boss Encounter. I spent so much time after school, during the weekends to polish this game up. Nothing changed since high school...but this was actually for school!

 

Anyway, fast forward to a few years later and I "upgraded" the MonstraCity project to VS 2010 and XNA 4.0. But uh oh...it broke the collision, the fixed function fog, and the game was basically unplayable. It stayed like that for years, but I finally took time to restore it. The version I'm presenting to download on my website has a couple QoL improvements. I added a rudimentary Save System and made the collision a little friendlier so the Player slides along the wall rather then coming to a dead stop. Lastly, I decided to embrace the low-fidelity look and purposefully set the resolution very low. The spirit of the original is intact.

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My first 3D project makes me so wistful for days when this was all new to me. By the time I was a senior, DePaul switched to introducing students to 3D with Unity 3.0. I'm just so glad I was exposed via XNA, that really forced me to go "lower level."

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CHICHI TO THE RESCUE 3D 

My original "ChiChi to the Rescue" was only five years ago, but what a lifetime that felt like back then! Once again, my whole world shifted! Actually, when I first made my Portfolio ~2012, I uploaded screenshots of "ChiChi to the Rescue 3D" but I was told that Portfolios are judged by their worst-looking content (regardless of context) so I took it down. Now, a decade later, I'm putting it back up for all to see! This project was alot of firsts for me: first time writing shaders, first time rigging characters, first time creating a level editor! Alot more ambitious than the original...and I never finished all the levels. TO BE CONTINUED...

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