I'm Kirill Poletaev, also known as KEYREAL, and my hobby is game development. That includes designing games, programming them, creating engines, making 2D and 3D art, composing music, designing sound, writing tutorials and so on.
This site, Kircode, is a central hub for all my projects.
Below is a timeline that shows what I've been up to until now.
I was born.
Two of my favorite things while growing up were computer games and Newgrounds - a website where anyone could submit animations and games they made using Macromedia Flash. I would spend days surfing Newgrounds, dreaming of one day being able to create cartoons too. I did not have Flash at the time, so I used to make short animations by drawing cartoon frames using MS Paint and then joining them together into animated GIF images.
Eventually I got a copy of Flash, and started making and submitting my first Flash animations and games to Newgrounds. Most of my earliest work was "blammed" (voted for deletion by the community) for very poor quality.
One of my games got unexpectedly popular on Newgrounds. Tom Fulp, the founder of NG, offered me an opportunity to try making money off my Flash games by placing ads in them. I've started seriously learning programming in my spare time from school.
I've started a programming tutorial blog (now abandoned), where I would write tutorials to teach coding while learning it myself. I published a new tutorial every day for 3 years. I have learned a lot, and this experience would later help me secure my first job as a programmer. I have made many Flash games in this period.
I graduated high school, entered university (studying Computer Science), and got my first real part-time job as a programmer in a local company. I would continue my game development hobby in my spare time from university and work.
I've started another programming tutorial blog - Haxecoder. This time it was dedicated to Haxe, which is both a programming language and a compiler. The idea was the same as before - I would teach the language as I learned it myself. The good people at OpenFL noticed my work and endorsed it. This is the first time I got involved in the Open Source community, learning a ton in the process.
I've started working on my first "real" commercial game - Hypnorain. I've faced a lot of challenges, and spent a while practicing drawing to make the art for my game. I've also started learning music theory, and later composed the soundtrack for Hypnorain.
I've finished Hypnorain and had it published on Steam. This year I graduated from university and turned my part-time programming contract into a full-time job. In my spare time I've started working on a 3D game engine YUME, and a game to go with it - Speebot.
Speebot was finished and released on Steam.
Began working on YUME Engine Generation 2, and a new puzzle adventure game.
Continued working on the puzzle adventure game, which was announced to be Phantom Path.
Finished and released Phantom Path on Steam. Experimented with new enhancements for the next version of the YUME Game Engine.
Released Pilie Pals, a 3D puzzle game.
Announced Citadelic, a base building and defending strategy game with roguelite elements.
Finished and released Citadelic on Steam.