About Progorion:

Progorion LLC is a software development company based in Hungary (EU). The company was formed by gaming geek András Illés in 2016 next to his business career as a Solution Architect and Product Owner. Progorion LLC is focusing on developing strategy games, and its most famous release is Computer Tycoon so far. Most of the team are contractors from all around the world.

Now... this is all true, but with this all being said, if you'd like to know a bit more about the founder, so about Andris... (me) - then contine reading my friend!

All in all, I think my most important quality is that I love learning, technology and art and I enjoy creating things. For example, I started learning about music at a very young age. There was nobody to encourage me, there was nobody who wanted me to do that. So I always felt like "creating music" is something that is my very own thing. It is not like with drawing because way more people liked to draw in school, I had a few friends who were excelling in painting and drawing and while I also really enjoyed these activities, I never considered them to be something that identify me.

So I started playing on the piano first. This is still my favourite instrument, I'm not so bad with the guitar and I've learnt a little bit of everything during the years, such as plaing the drums the bass the violin or the harmonica. I had the luck to play in bands and more importantly having the means to write my own music. I've released multiple albums since then, but let's not jump forward that much as of yet.

Of course, just as nearly all the kids at my age I started playing video-games. Now what is important in my case is that I was coming from a really poor family, so I couldn't get the latest consoles at the time, neither a proper computers. And even getting those were a challenge. When my classmates were playing on Pentium 2 or 3 computers I've built my own IBM 286 PC with a 12Mhz CPU and 2Mb os RAM. Yes! Before that I had a Commodore 64 for a while as well - but I realised very soon, that a PC is better because it is easier to upgrade it gradually... So I've upgraded to a 386 CPU and then a 486 CPU... and so on.

The good thing about all of this is that I've played a lot of old games, and I've learnt how to deal with a Command Line etc. This is cool! Even tho these were sometimes older devices than myself, I loved all of them. I was the kind of kid who was falling asleep with a DOS manual haha... yeah... I was a nerd. If you are here because of Computer Tycoon, then now you understand how I developed my love and knoweladge about old computers.

I didn't need much time before I started thinking about making my own games. My first tries were on that old Commodore 64, but unfortunately around being 10 years old I couldn't understand the books about programming I've found in the library (about Basic of course), especially that they were written in English and at the time I was learning German, not English (I'm Hungarian), so yeah... The most I was able to do is saving texts on my casettes, that is cool... but it is definitely far from programming.

A bit later when I was able to Install Windows 3.1 on my computer I've started to create pixel-art and pixel animations. I've spent days or even weeks with that, and I really enjoyed it. But I was able to make my very first game way later, when I had Windows 95. Don't think about anything huge, I was just merely modifing tutorials I've found with an ancient game creator software. Being honest I don't even remember its name anymore. Then later I've started using Macromedia Flash. Even tho my programming skills were extremely limited I managed to make a game with all the bells and whistles! You had to swat mosquitoes which looked like one of my friends, and they never kept coming back in bigger and bigger numbers! :) I also had a lot of fun with RPGMakgers and other tools...

So at this point I made little games, graphics and music (I was still just playing on the piano/synth). Sweet old times, without any thoughts about money and livelihood! At the age of 14 I had to decide what I'd like to study and I was thinking about being a literature teacher or a programmer. Yeah... I forgot to tell that I was also invested in storytelling/writing and poetry. Eventually I went with programming purely because at the time I thought that with that I can actually earn money, and still living in poverty, it soundsd reasonable. (I was right). But while I always thought that this will be also useful to make games, I never beleived that I can make a career as a game developer in Hungary. Since the gamedev scene is nearly inexistent at the time, with maybe one or two companies at maximum.

After finishing my programming studies I started working at local IT companies developing R&D projects and later enterprise applications, next to this I've always spent a significant chunk of my free time with either writing music or learning/doing game development. Wrapping up this story, in 2016 when I was a solution architect/product manager and I had enough savings to... to try the big dream of being an indie game developer, I've transitioned into a part-time contractor position for a year while I was learning more about marketing and the gamedev market, and then in 2017 I've decided to work on my dream project called Computer Tycoon.

It was a formidable task, but all the experience with releasing metal albums, pomoting those albums plus all my creative projects and the fact that I've developed several big business applications at my full-time programmer/team-lead positions helped me out, and I'm happy to tell that my first big commercial project has a moderate success in Early Access. I know how many fails with their first release, I know how hard it is to live from art. (I've been there with my music... getting excellent reviews about your work and being recognized as an artist is an invalueable feeling, but it won't pay the bills...) So I'm very happy and lucky where I am. Obviously this career is still very risky, hard and needs a lot of creative and business talent, plus constant learning - so I try to stay open and learn whenever I just can. While today being an indie game developer is what identifies me the most (I think), I'm also more and more interested in YouTube and content creation... but it is another story, and who knows where it ends?

If you are reading this, then you were really interested in me or in my company for some reason, so you should know that I don't bite, feel free to email me if you have any questions, I try to find the time to answer to all the messages I get. Thanks for reading - I wish you all the best!

Andris aka Progorion


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