We are a team of 2 guys who are passionate about building games. We founded Helldorado Team in 2005 (when our website was a rudimentary, static HTML page in Angelfire with a page view counter in the footer that we were supremely proud of) and since then we’ve been working with all types of game technologies – Java Applets, Microsoft Direct3D, Microsoft XNA, OpenGL, Doom WADs (Doom Builder), Half Life Source Engine, Counter-Strike maps, you name it. However we have one sole focus: making the sort of games that we want to play. Lately we’ve transitioned solely to making games for mobile devices and will continue to do so. We released our flagship title Condor Wars for Android in 2012 and we’ve just recently launched (June 2015) a game whose inception was conceived in 2010 and is now finally released for iPhone, The Descent. Check it out!
Elioncho
Elioncho is from Barranquilla and his interest in “Science” began very early in his life when he won 2nd place in a Science Fair competition where he was responsible for creating a Fruit Fly farm by basically putting a banana inside a jar and waiting for flies to appear. With regards to games Elioncho’s interest in games started when he was very young by playing games in the NES, SNES and Nintendo 64 consoles. In the latter console he excelled at taking the ramp in Mario Kart 64’s Koopa Troopa Beach. Career-wise Elioncho has been more of a man in a perpetual journey to find himself and pursue his passions. He has flip-flopped from pursuing a career in Medicine, then switching to Graphic Design and ultimately obtaining a Software Engineering degree from Universidad del Norte. He also served a brief stint as a restaurant owner and manager, where he was responsible for basically everything – from installing POS terminals to cross-checking supplier invoices. He got bored of this double life and is now fully dedicated to Helldorado Team as a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none.
Most of Elioncho’s experience has been in building web apps using Ruby on Rails, where he has more skills in installing Gems to develop functionality than in actual coding. His first game was a Rubik Cube Java Applet, followed by a Battleship Java multiplayer game which didn’t really work well because it used Java Sockets. Elioncho has recently moved away from those obsolete technologies in favor of iOS development using Objective-C and frameworks SpriteKit. Besides game development, Elioncho occasionally takes out the garbage, which consists mainly of pizza boxes and soda cans.
Tiogus
Tiogus is also from Barranquilla and was Elioncho’s teammate in the Science Fair competition where they won 2nd place. He was crucial in letting the flies inside the jar that was used to grow the fruit fly farm. As a young kid Tiogus took a completely different path towards game development. He played Sega games instead of Nintendo titles and was heavily ridiculed for doing so throughout much of his childhood. He pursed a degree in Computer Science from Penn State University and spent much of his time there eating Orange Chicken from Panda Express (almost on a daily basis). His first game was a space shooter written in C++ using DirectDraw (DirectX), followed by a plethora of unreleased OpenGL “technical demos” developed during his 4-year stay in State College. He is particularly proud of a Quake 2 Texture Loader written in C++ and OpenGL that he developed during his Senior year but which probably crashes now on Windows 7+ machines. At Helldorado Team, Tiogus calls himself either “Project Specialist” or “Spackle Coder” depending on the job at hand.
Tiogus used to focus previously on custom web app development in Java but now is purely devoted to Android and iOS development. His development philosophy used to be “WRITE EVERYTHING YOURSELF” and “REINVENT THE WHEEL”, but after years of unreleased apps using frameworks built from scratch, now favors the use of tried and tested frameworks to focus more on actual app functionality. Besides development, Tiogus is also responsible for keeping the kitchen fully stocked with a wide variety of Espressos, the latest addition being an exotic Espresso from the mountains of Nicaragua.