It's December 25th, 2025 as I'm writing this. I'm at my grandmother's house in eastern Slovakia, helping deal with the leftovers from Christmas Eve dinner. The place smells like cherry liquor I bought for my parents mixed with old wooden furniture that instantly reminds me of being a kid. While doing dishes and packing food away, I kept thinking about what the first blog post on this site should be about. Eventually I landed on the obvious answer.

This feels like a clean starting point. I like the idea of thinking about 2026 as year 0 for me. I'm calling it Ex Somno, or ES for short, which roughly means "out of sleep" in Latin. It fits pretty well. For most of my life I felt like I was half asleep, constantly fighting myself. Motivation, discipline, focus, sticking with things, all of that felt harder than it looked for other people. Whether it was fitness, money, holding a job longer than six months, or just not feeling lonely all the time, I always felt behind.

The one thing I did have going for me was that I never fully gave up. I spent a lot of my younger years trying to figure out why things felt harder for me and how to work around that. Over time I learned what ADHD actually means for me and how to deal with it instead of fighting it. I'm not magically fixed, but I'm better at managing myself than I used to be. And now that things are at least somewhat under control, I can finally focus on something I've wanted to do for a long time. Making unique and incredible gaming experiences.

10 y/o – getting high on creativity

The idea of starting a game studio didn't show up out of nowhere. It goes way back. One of the earliest moments I remember was in elementary school, sometime around year 18 IS (In Sommo – in sleep) if we want to keep the stupid calendar going. We were in the computer lab during a free period. A friend was walking from PC to PC trying to find one with Counter-Strike 1.6 installed. When he finally found one, we sat down to play with bots since we either didn't know about online play or couldn't use it.

He loved it. I didn't really. I wasn't a competitive kid and at this point in my life, I tended to avoid any type of conflict. But I loved watching – I was obsessed with little details like the reload animation of the Dual Berettas, how the Desert Eagle showed an empty chamber when you ran out of ammo, stuff like that. Pretty quickly we settled into a different routine where I picked the map, chose the weapons, set up the bots, and then he played while I watched. And something in my brain clicked at that moment.

That moment stuck with me. I realized I got more enjoyment out of setting things up for someone else than being the one playing. That applied outside of games too, as I was usually the one inventing games to play during breaks or after school. We'd mix spies, lightsabers, and Harry Potter spells together with zero concern for consistency. Looking back, a lot of my early creativity was just mashing together things I liked. I heard somewhere that this is a trait of Autism hah.

Later on, sometime in middle school, I downloaded Adobe Flash and started making animations. At one point I asked my dad how to make something happen when you clicked a button. He was a programmer, so he looked it up and showed me a tiny bit of ActionScript:

stop();

myButton.onRelease = function() {
   gotoAndPlay(10);
};

When button (or any kind of object) was clicked at, it would skip to the 10th frame on the timeline. I looked like magic to me. I was terrified of code back then, because I hated math (thank you, school) and was convinced someone like me was just too stupid to program.

So I abused that tiny snippet of code as much as possible. You'd be surprised how much value and complex gameplay you squeeze out of a snippet of code that simple. I copied it between projects and changed the number. At first I made simple choice based flash animations, later on more complex games. I remember making a sniper game (with kill counting, ammo and everything) using nothing but frame switching. No variables, nothing. Kinda impressive what my irrational fear of learning to code made me do to be honest.

That Flash period is something I remember very fondly. After school I would sit at the computer all evening, not playing games but making things. When I wasn't working, I was browsing Newgrounds and looking at what other people made. The only thing about this era that I regret, was that I never finished anything. I would always start a new project, work on it relentlessly for a few days or a week, and then get bored an jump to something else. I wish I had finished something and had released it to the world.

Actually, I did manage to finish something once. I made a Flash animation as a birthday present for a friend and burned it onto a DVD. I even drew a DVD cover and printed it onto the DVD (thank you Dad for buying a printer that could print on DVDs for whatever reason). Everyone at the birthday party watched it together, but when it ended, there was an awkward silence. One kid said: "You know, you could have tried harder to make it a bit better". Ouch. He was right though, it wasn't very good. While I was very passionate about making stuff, I couldn't draw very well and I wasn't focused enough to actually get better at my craft. Like I mentioned before, I couldn't even muster up the courage to try out coding. My interest in Flash slowly faded out after this incident.

14 y/o – programming for the first time

Near the end of middle school, Minecraft was getting popular at our school and I wanted to make mods for it. That led me to YouTube tutorials and eventually to a Java series by TheNewBoston and his Java Tutorial Series (at the time of writing, the first episode had been viewed over 6.8 mil times). Those videos were the first thing that got me into "real" programming. To be completely honest, I barely understood what I was doing, for the most part I was just copying over what Bucky was writing in the video, but for the first time I felt like I had actual tools to turn ideas into something real. Bucky (the guy behind the YouTube channel) didn't follow the best coding practices, or architectural patters, but I feel like I owe my entire career as a software engineer to him and those early beginnings. Thinking back, it really feels like I found my way to programming through sheer luck. I probably wouldn't have started if I couldn't find any YouTube tutorials for it. I know I definitely wouldn't have taken the university route.

I started with console apps (like this timer app I still have a screen recording of), then websites, then followed a tutorial for a simple 2D game in Java using the Graphics class. All graphical calculations ran on the CPU, so I remember hearing my computer fan spin up like crazy every time I launched my game (even through headphones). Good times.

18 y/o – real life

In high school I kept exploring different technologies and slowly got better at coding. Math started to make more sense once I had a reason to use it and visually see what the silly characters and symbols translate to in the real world (or rather the virtual world). Despite still not liking school much, after graduating, I enrolled in a local university for computer science. However, expectedly, I dropped out after one semester. I pretended to still go to class for a while before admitting it to my parents, and they really let me have it. Seeing as they were of an older generation where college meant everything, what I basically admitted to was throwing my entire future away.

The reason I dropped out was, that when I started looking for a part time job, I realized I actually knew a lot more than I thought. Employers were very interested in having me. I actually knew how to program really well. That was a huge confidence boost, especially because of my parents reaction that took me a long time to forgive them for. Looking back, dropping out was one of the best decisions I made. I remember some of my classmates who finished their bachelors' degree tried applying to the same companies I went to with just my high school diploma, and they didn't get in.

My first job was at a small local game studio making very simple casual games. Nothing fancy. The pay wasn't great, but I couldn't believe I was getting paid to code. I still remember my first day at the office, feeling overwhelmingly happy as I was setting up my workspace, that I'm going to get paid for doing what I was doing all the time in my free time anyway. I stayed for three months before quitting because my mental health was getting worse and I needed to deal with that.

21 – none is born a scholar

My early twenties were messy. A lot of confusion, a lot of self work. Game development went on the back burner while I tried to figure out how to function like a normal adult. My ADHD became a real problem at this point in my life. I had a girlfriend at the time, but she didn't really understand what I was going through. At one point I even thought I wasn't cut out for programming and tried to get a retail job. Luckily that didn't work out (thank you Apple Store for rejecting me) and I came back to tech to try one last time. After years of pain, I finally began to regain control over my mind, and I could work for 6 months before falling apart due to executive dysfunction. Then I made it a year before getting fired. And then things started going so well, that I could actually keep a job.

The idea for Brimstone showed up around this time. I came up with the name (because it sounded cool) and it has been stuck in my head ever since. The logo idea followed shortly after (🜍 is the alchemical symbol for sulphur), during the same period of trying to figure out what I wanted to build long term, beyond just keeping a job until the day that I die.

Not long after that, I got my first paid Unity gigs. One of them was a mobile diary style app that ended up failing after a lot of part time work. I was even hired full time for a bit, but the scope got out of control. That project didn't work out, but it's where I met my friend Helo. Helo and I later spent about a year of weekends and evenings working on a multiplayer voxel shooter called Chunkers († 2022) (the Steam page of the long dead project is still available online). The scope exploded and I wasn't a very good programmer or software architect at that time, and soon, the 7k line long Shooting.cs megaclass was just too much for me to handle. I eventually made the call to cancel it, after we were working on it for a year straight over weekends, holidays and off hours. A very bitter lesson for sure. We kept in touch and did make a smaller game jam game about delivering pizzas using a rocket launcher afterward: Rocket Fast Delivery (2023)

I'm slowly reviving the Chunkers idea as the first proper release under Brimstone, under the name Undermined as the first proper release.

That's the story so far. Nothing polished, nothing finished yet, but a lot of learning along the way, only a whole lot of embarrassment, failure and shitty games that look like asset flips behind me.

28 (going on 29) – what lies ahead

And yet, that's not the end of it. If my early 20s taught me anything, it's that progress rarely looks clean while it's happening. Things usually get messier before they get better. You don't build a solid house without digging the foundations first, even if that part feels pointless or uncomfortable at the time.

That said, I want to be clear about one thing. I've been very lucky. I've been healthy. I had access to the internet early on. I found programming young. I didn't have to deal with war, famine, or survival-level problems. I got to sit in front of a computer and make bad games instead. That's a privilege, even when things felt rough mentally.

Most of the setbacks I went through were friction, not disasters. They were the kind of problems you slowly grind down by learning how you work, what you're bad at, and what you need to build around instead of fighting. A lot of that work had nothing to do with games directly, but without it, none of the rest would matter.

If you're reading this, something led you to this blog post. Maybe you know me personally and you're curious what I'm up to these days. Maybe one of the games worked and found the audience it was meant for, which means that my goals have come to fruition.

Either way, this is the point where things start getting more focused. Fewer ideas floating around, more things actually getting finished.

Merry Christmas, thanks for reading, and happy new year of 0 Ex Somno