Online I go mostly by the username MikeHart. I am german, born in 1966, happily married, a software engineer by trade and love most stuff around computers, games in general and music. And my family of course.
I had my first program written in the age of 15 or 16. Can't remember. It was written on checkered paper, over night, with just the manual of my friend's C64, which he had lend to me (the manual).
Next day I went back to my friend and typed it into his machine. It was a version of 2-player snake and played against each other for days/weeks to come. For sure we had fun.
Thinking back, the restrictions such a closed system gave you, inspired creativity and problem solution skills.
Like most here in Germany and the 80s, during my 3 year job training I was able to buy a Commodore C64. I didn't really tried to program it, played more games on it. My favorite games back then were sport games and of course, ELITE! I think it was my all time favorite game (the old version, not the new Elite Dangerous). The limit graphics capabilities inspired your brain to fill the void, it was more about gameplay than visuals.
During the second half of the 80s, we got a few IBM PCs at work. There I was introduced to DBase and the Clipper language. To help myself fullfilling tasks at my job, I wrote software and tools in Clipper to speed up work tasks. All self eductated with just the manual at hand.
In the first half of the 90s, I got a degree in Bussines Information Technologies (Wirtschaftsinformatik), still working at my day job and going to school at night. Hard times but it worked out. For my final exam I had also written software in Clipper that was well received. Of course, I used my work experience and knowledge to develop a tool that had a background from my day job.
I am working in the billing department of a local utility provider. There we use SAP Utilities and I develop reports and programs in the ABAP language to help daily tasks, make changes in the data and so on. You can call me an Inhouse Consultant if you want.
While trying game development on the Commodore Amiga 500 (AMOS) and Atari STF 1025 (STOS) I think it was in the years 1999 and 2000, when I got the hold of 3D GameStudio and also DarkBasic. I dabled in these tools but never wrote a released full game with it. Blitz3D was later added to this toolset, but again only played with it.
But I had written some addons and libraries back then. For 3D GameStudio I developed in C++ and distributed for a short time addons that help you utilize
In 2002 I wrote an Code editor in Delphi 6 called IndeED which you could use with your favorite BASIC programming language.
It supported
After the turmoil with the owner ship of IBasic Pro, I helped out keeping it alive and wrote an extensive 2D sprite extension for IBasic Pro. It was well received but the community was closed down and so interest in IBasic Pro.
I joined the Thinbasic community, rewrote my sprite extension on PowerBasic for using it in thinbasic and some great years. Sadly it was Windows only and my interest in cross platform development and mobile support grew by the day.
I always say that onces you know a mainstream language, learning another one is easy. So I jumped into Ansca Mobile which used LUA as its lanuage to create apps/games for mobile. It was later renamed to Corona SDK and goes by Solar2D these days. As I wasn't happy with its former owner, hanlding things, I went to Gideros Mobile for a bit. Helped with their user manual a bit as well.
BlitzResearch released Monkey X around 2010/2011 I think, a cross platform game development language that target Desktop, Web and Mobile. I was hooked and later was hired by Packt Publishing to write a book about game development in Monkey X.
It is called Monkey Game Development: Beginner's Guide and showes you how to develop 10 simple games with Monkey X and my framework fantomEngine.
You can still grab a copy from Amazon.
In 2017 the late Mark Sibly decided to discontinue Monkey X and released it under a generous open source license. Together Martin Leidel and myself rebranded it under the name Cerberus X* and continued its development. Martin left in 2018 to pursue a professional carier as a game developer.
So I became the main developer for Cerberus X. With the help of a few others I updated and worked on Cerberus X till the beginning of 2024. Job load at my dayjob and taking on a 2nd part time job at PeopleFun took a toll at my mental health so I decided to step down at Cerberus X and my team mate Philipp Moeller took over. To this day he supports Cerberus X and you can find it at
Try it, its great!!!
From 2021 to 2023 I worked part time at PeopleFun, all next to my day-job. They had several very very succesful games developed in Monkey X and had created their own framework for it. I helped moving everything to Cerberus X and worked on some framework releated parts, mostly backend stuff. It was a great experience but also very demanding time wise. None the less, I am glad that I got the chance working in and with a AAA mobile studio and getting to know the industry a little.
I have released to retro inspired games at itch.io. I don't make money of it but I am happy if people play them. You can find them here:
Like other countless software developers, I have uploaded some of my work at Github. You can find it at
https://www.github.com/mikehart66
I love dabbling in art programs, mostly vector art. I have created art work for other peoples games, but that was long time ago. My plan is to pick up my guitar again, once my dog passes (hope that is still far far away). He doesn't like me practicing, lol!