About

I'm Daniel Bier. Bytesoul is my one-person game studio, and I make games with soul.

My first game was Super Mario Land on the Game Boy. Even on that tiny screen I could get lost in a world. Then came Pokémon, the Super Nintendo in colour on the TV, and Mario Kart. Later many hours on the PlayStation, and finally the PC.

In 2002, at 15, I made my first game: Eventyr, built with RPG Maker 2000. More followed, and they were all far too big to ever be finished.

In 2014 I started New Eden, a survival game where every player has their own island. Over three years I got it to version 0.3: an island generator, trucks, a helicopter and a ship, conveyor belts, farming, a furnace, charcoal piles, trading between islands. You could already play a lot of it. But it wasn't finished, and the code underneath had become a mess.

In 2017 I released Bouncy Rocks, a small arcade game, and it was the first game I actually finished. That taught me what I still do today: keep it small enough to finish, and only call a step done once I can play it.

How I work

I do all of it myself: the rules, the code, the art, the sound and the store page. I build in Unity with C#, for Android and PC.

A Bytesoul game usually starts from something personal. Jolly is a card game I play at the table with my grandma.

I pay attention to details that most players never notice but would miss. I try to make the rules exact and the controls simple. I don't collect data about players. I want to earn something with my games, but fairly. I try to keep any ads unobtrusive, and purchases are cheap and one-time, to own a game. No in-game rip-offs, no expensive subscriptions.

About AI

I design, decide and playtest everything myself. AI tools help me write code and only create art when there is no other sensible way. Chores belong to AI, art belongs to humans. It's a tool to create my vision.

Before Bytesoul

Around the time I made my first games, I started at a technical school for mechatronics. After Bouncy Rocks came a long break from making games. In those years, CAD and 3D printing became my hobby: I designed parts and printed them myself.

Now I'm back, this time building with AI tools. The years in CAD come with me: I modelled the jet engines in Turbo Chariot myself, based on cutaway drawings of real ones.

Get in touch

Write to me at bytesoul@gmx.at. For press material, see the press page.