About

Hi, I’m David Hagar, the “lead developer” (i.e., only person involved in this insanity) of TigerByte Games. I work as a software analyst/developer in the public service sector, and I received my formal educational training (in IT Project Management) from Davenport University in Grand Rapids, MI. This website and any projects I throw up on here basically represent what I do in my limited spare time as I do have a full time job, a family, and an increasingly difficult-to-suppress urge to change my name to Alfonso and disappear somewhere into Central or South America, start a hobby farm, and sit around smoking expensive Cuban cigars all day.

I enjoy fantasy and sci-fi books and media and I’ve been heavily inspired in my personal creative life by series such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dune, Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere, and The Dark Tower (among numerous other Stephen King works). At one point I had a very strong desire to become an author and did try my hand at writing several novels, but ultimately I came to the realization that I don’t possess the command of language and imagination needed to really pull something off like what some of the writers of the works listed above have accomplished. Thankfully I’ve also long had a desire to create games, and I’m fine with my works being derivative inasmuch as I can still create interesting and unique worlds and situations and have fun doing it. I think that if I can at least manage to create something mechanically interesting that allows people to experience some of the wonder of visiting a new world and spending many hours building and making things in it, that’s a pretty worthy goal to pursue.

I grew up during the “Golden Age” of gaming and my first consoles were an Atari and a Nintendo, followed by SNES, which was probably my all time favorite gaming system. I spent many hours playing games like Sid Meier’s Civilization, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VI. I still hold the aesthetic from that time period and my love for JRPGs close to heart, although when I do manage to play games these days, they’re much more likely to be strategy or base-building titles that I can dump hundreds of hours into such as Rimworld or Crusader Kings.

Over a decade ago, I attempted to create a game called Cult: Awakening of the Old Ones and ran a successful Kickstarter campaign. It was built primarily in the Python language on top of the popular libTCOD library for roguelikes. Unfortunately at that time I didn’t understand what I was getting myself into. I had a lot of big dreams about what the game could become and I was fascinated by procedural generation, and I ended up promising a grab-bag of incredibly complex mechanics that I wanted to eventually implement over a decades-long period a la Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress fame. However, I simply didn’t have a strong enough grasp of coding or the game development process to pull it off, and worse, because I began the project in Python, I ended up running into insurmountable speed/processing hurdles; Python is a language geared towards accessibility and ease of use, but is notoriously slow at CPU-intensive tasks. I was eventually forced to cancel the project and spent the next several years paying back all the backers who requested refunds as I did not simply want to be memorialized as another KickStarter creator who “took the money and ran” (as a side note, if you happen to be a backer of Cult who happens to come across this page and still haven’t received your refund for some reason, please send an email to [email protected]; I do still occasionally check for new activity from previous backers).

I have a beautiful wife and a precocious, adorable daughter who’s quickly growing up and becoming much smarter than daddy was at the same age. My wife is a Taiwanese national and I would very much like to move to Taiwan one day, as it’s a gorgeous country with an incredibly rich culture, highly-developed cities, and some of the best food you’ll find anywhere in the world. It’s also a great place to go for very long runs if you enjoy mountain views.

I like dogs and cats but I do not like their fur. I have a pet bunny named Spirit. I was born in 1986 and I believe in keeping an open mind, admitting mistakes, and attempting to not be so selfish in a culture where selfishness is often enshrined as the norm (I am not always good at this). I drink way too much coffee.