About

Hi there! My name is Van Aarde Krynauw, and welcome to my humble corner of the internet. I love making games, vfx, and technical art and even moreso when I get to do them at the same time!

The TL;DR version: I live and breathe gamedev and VFX while wielding the power of Unreal Engine and Houdini, armed with unwavering determination and perseverence.

Here’s the slightly longer version…

Make it go +1

My first memories of being interested in gamedev was from when I was around 12 years old.

I remember playing Nibbles and Gorillas written in MS-DOS QBasic and the fascination it instilled of having access to the source code that brought these games to life. I rummaged through the code not really understanding what was going on, trying to figure out how on earth all of this could make a game, but more importantly … how can I change it! Before even knowing what programming really was, I managed to figure out to how to change the Nibbles source code that so that whenever the snake hit a wall, instead of losing one life I would gain one life. No more game over for me – now I make the rules! Already embracing it at a young age, this inquisitive, determined and persistent nature is what defines and drives me to this very day.

Disassemble!

My parents needed no convincing that they had an insatiable code slinger on their hands. They managed to get me into programming classes at my school with the 16 year-old students. I learned to program in Turbo Pascal and by the time I was 16 I was already coding my own fire effects, font editors and BMP loaders in Mode 13h (the 256 color VGA graphics mode) with some rudimentary Assembly language, because it was just faster to blit pixels that way.

I was a huge fan of the Space Quests, Police Quests, Monkey Islands, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. I enjoyed the stories, the puzzles and have always been enamoured with how the old pixel-art games were able to generate the illusion of motion through color LUT scrolling. That’s some old school realtime vfx right there! And of course I decompiled the LucasArts games that were built with the ScummVM, to get an idea of how they worked.

Now, make it 3D!

What I really wanted to do though was to make my own 3D adventure game … but there was a lot that I needed to learn first! To further this goal, I started learning C/C++ and DirectX at the age of 17 in preparation for my final computer studies project that I wanted to implement as my final year project. For my final year project I got as far as loading textured Quake3 models (from MD3 files), being able to click on a ground plane to make the character run around (with my own mouse cursor/screen projection logic and camera system). The user could also click various on-screen buttons to play different animations from the MD3 file. I never managed to build my 3D adventure game but the glorified Quake MD3 loader served to deepend my appreciation and fuel my passion for gamedev.

The gamedev industry in South Africa was next to non-existent at the time, so I pursued the closest thing I could find which was a Computer Science degree at the University of Stellenbosch. By the time that I finished my degree, my childhood dreams of becoming a game developer seemed like a distant and unattainable fantasy. After finishing my BScHons in Computer Science, I started with a Master’s degree but received a job opportunity in the VFX industry and decided to followed that instead. If I couldn’t make games, at least I can work on movies!

Aaaand, Action!

And so my career in the VFX industry kicked off in South Africa in 2008, jumping into the deep end with Houdini 9 no less! From the get-go I tackled projects such as integrating the open source Bullet Physics Solver into Houdini SOPs for faster RDB sims and developed the geo2emp tools that allowed us to import Naiad Fluid Solver data into Houdini. I soon found myself moving to Sydney, Australia, (joining Happy Feet 2, and later Mad Max) being swept up in a wave of new-found excitement, developing cutting-edge graphics tech to achieve amazing VFX and bring films to life in new ways.

During those seven amazing years abroad I having met, and learned from, so many wonderful people. Yet, during all that time I still yearned to make games. I spent nights and weekends cobbling together little games using open source libraries (Ogre3D engine, SDL, etc), trying out various game engines / frameworks (Cocos2D/3D, Moai) for various projects and eventually settled on Unity for a while.

Returning to the dream

Back in 2016, when my first-born turned one year old, my wife and I made the decision to move back home to be closer to our family. I left the film industry behind and started my own company (Leaping Rhino), along with two other friends, with a dream of eventually turning the company into a full-time game development studio. While we started out using Unity, for various reasons, we quickly switched over to Unreal Engine and we never looked back.

We funded our game development endeavours (Monocyte Games) through our client services company (Leaping Rhino). It was a long and arduous journey of burning the proverbial candle at both ends for minimal salaries so that we could make games. As painful as it was, I found it to be equally rewarding … in a torturous kind of way. During this time I had the incredible privilege of being able to have worked with SideFX on the Houdini Engine plugin for Unreal over a period of three years, while still working on our game too. Having had extensive experience with both Houdini and Unreal Engine and developing a game, we had very niche skillset to offer at that intersection. Later on we also received an Epic MegaGrant for our game, Glimpse, that allowed us to dedicate more time to our game development. We also participated (and won!) in the 2022 Epic Megajam!

For seven years we burned those two-sided candles, accumulating a wealth of knowledge and experience (and dark rings under my eyes!) but as with all good things it had to come to an end. As the money dried up, so did the chapter and it was time to move on. And even through all the gamedev struggles and frustrations I have rediscovered my happy place. I am glad that I took the opportunity and made the time to pursue my dreams from a distant childhood.

“Never give up, never surrender!” - Adml. James T. Nesbitt

And now I have started the next big chapter in my career. Armed with my signature determination and persistence, it is with renewed vigor that I set out along this path that I have once dreamt of walking. Watch this space!