Hi!👋

I’m Julian, a multidisciplinary video-game developer based in Hamburg, Germany. I do technical art and gameplay programming, mostly in Unity.

Professional Projects

Misgiven Symmetry Break Studio Role: Technical Director, Technical Artist Platform: Windows	X5-Framework Super Crowd Role: Technical Artist, Programming Platform: WebGL
Battle Planet – Judgement Day Threaks Role: Switch & PS4 Port., Add. Programming Platform: Windows, PS4, Switch	Lucid Trips Lucid Trips Team Role: Technical Artist, Programming Platform: VR (SteamVR)
Tower Tag VR-Nerds Role: Technical Artist Platform: VR (SteamVR)	Various Freelancing Projects (2017+)

For more details, please look at my LinkedIn profile.

Game Jams

Andenken (2023) InnoGameJam 2023 Role: Programming Platform: Playdate	Growing Home (2023) Global Game Jam 2023 Role: Writing, Programming Platform: Windows

Personal Projects

"Sheep Game" (2016+) (more soon)	Infinite Ballon Ride (2016) (more soon)

Micro Projects

• Compute-based grass shader for Unity
• Baked pivots and wind animation
• Procedural squash n’ stretch shader
• Misgiven tech-art breakdown

About

Currently, I’m co-founder and technical director at Symmetry Break. Here, I’m responsible for all coding, tech-art and infrastructure matters. With the help of the GameCity Hamburg Incubator and Prototype funding, we developed a vertical slice of our first game: Misgiven. Also, we release Screen Space God Rays, a shader for fast and beautiful god rays.

Before that, I worked at Super Crowd Entertainment as a graphics and general Unity programmer, helping them to build the X5-Framework. The X5-Framework was used to create online 2D-isometric hub worlds, essentially allowing Super Crowd to let their popular MAG convention happen online during the Covid-19 pandemic. (We even won an award for that). It was also used to create other events, for example, Dreamhack Beyond. My part included the technical pipeline for all art matters and general gameplay programming.

My professional career started in 2015, when I worked on an experimental VR game called Lucid Trips. That included a tool that helped render the large planetary world efficiently and allowed for further visual improvements. Before that, I started modding for Crysis around 2009.

Since 2017, I have also worked as a freelancer and consultant and have successfully worked for both game companies (f.e. Threaks) and digital agencies (f.e. Demodern). I cannot show everything here, since some things are under NDA.

In 2021, I received my B.A.S. from the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Media Systems. The bachelor’s thesis was about text-space rendering in virtual reality.

Links

• Email: hi(at)julianheinken.com
• CV: here
• Mastodon: @schneckerstein@mastodon.gamedev.place
• Github: julhe
• LinkedIn: Julian Heinken
• Twitter (mostly inactive): @schneckerstein

Personal

Low-Level (game) development

Since 2019, I’ve gotten more invested in game engine development. This led to contributions to the Bevy game-engine and various small projects done in C, Rust, C++, and Zig.

This even lead me to start develop my own engine in my spare time. I’ve made a short overview video here.

Over the years, I gained lots of insight into low-level game development. This includes various graphics APIs, such as OpenGL and WebGPU, and different game engine architectural styles.