Things You Were Too Afraid to Ask: Laurens ‘Xoliul’ C.

Jubilations! We’ve got a brand-new staff interview for you today, shining our very inquisitive spotlight on Laurens, the only certified Belgian in the office. You may remember Laurens as the man behind the awesomely fantastic Brink Nerf Gun from a few months ago – turns out he works on video games, too. As one of our Technical Artists, Laurens is the vital glue between artists and programmers, ensuring there’s nothing standing in the way of awesome art for our games. Here’s a slice from Laurens’s interview:

Why did you want to work in the games industry and how did you get started?

I guess I never really grew up and still prefer to play with and build guns, tanks and little soldiers, things just got a bit more advanced as I got older. I used to build a lot of little models and gradually moved on to doing this in 3D on the computer, being shown basic 3DS Max when I tried Architecture in university helped a lot. I also fiddled with game config files when I was younger, it was fun to tweak numbers and experience the results ingame. I ended up studying “games” in Belgium. I was one of the first people to ever graduate from that course.

To find out more about Laurens’s work here at Splash Damage, his tips for breaking into the industry, his Dopefish nightmares, and much more, read the full interview.