Robert Nagy is one of our four programmers. He joined the team over half a year ago and took care of some of our most biggest challenges such as the save game system and settings system.
- Who are you and what do you do on "The Ball"? My name is Robert Nagy. I have mostly been doing user-interface programming such as the settings menu and hint system, and I implemented save games and achievements. I work part-time as a System Developer for the Swedish Television, with a specialization towards graphics and real-time systems. At the same time I'm also studying for my masters degree in Software Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology. In my spare time I work on "The Ball".
- When and how did you join the team? I joined the team in February 2010. I knew of of the developers and he recommended me to join the team. After a few mails, some face-to-face discussions, and a couple of small programming tasks I was able to join the team for real.
- How did you start out with programming? I got into programming during my first year in high school and I had as goal to create a graphics engine for my graduation project. I worked on it during pretty much all my spare time for three years long, and I learned a lot about graphics and programming. My project became a success and because of it I was offered a job right after graduation. I believe it is also thanks to my project that I was given the chance to join "The Ball".
- What has been the most challenging thing you have done on the game? The settings system. Most of the settings functionality of the UDK is not very well documented and some of the things that we wanted to implement weren't well support. We would not have been satisfied with limited user configuration, so we wanted a settings system that had all the features one would expect of a high quality game. It took a lot of reading through the UDK code and experimenting to figure out how all the different settings and required functionality could be implemented.
- What do you like the most about the game? The graphics! The modelling, effects, lighting etc. are great and as a graphics developer at heart it is something that hooked me up right at the beginning when I first saw "The Ball".