72dpiarmy

R.I.P. Florian.

At least we know he can make some fangames for people in the after-life...

Well this sucks. I hope the best for his family and friends.

RIP Florian
We will miss you!

The project must continue so he will be proud!

I can't say I knew Florian much, but from what I've heard/read he was a great guy. Truly sucks that people like him have to go so early in their lives.

For us, he brought Super Mario War, and that earns good respect from me.


As they say, an picture is worth a thousand words though; I think this describes better than words my (and I guess all your) feelings towards this:





rip

Wait! He died only few days ago?
I found out about this game while he was still alive, but registered after his death.

Rest in Peace, Florian Hufsky. Although I never knew you and you never knew me, I feel very sorry because everyone considered you as a great friend, and I know that you have connected so many people and that you have left a great masterpiece behind you - a game called Super Mario War.
You will never be forgotten and your work will always live.

Wow, this is just... wow. He's really dead? i can't believe it. He really died. The creator of SMWar is gone forever. He's never coming back. Wow. I can't believe it.

How did he die, anyway? From the details I was able to fish up, it seems like he committed suicide, but I just want to clarify.

I don't believe it.

He did.

;;

This is very depressing. I had a half brother commit suicide more than 10 years ago. It is very difficult to go through a family member's or friend's suicide.

R.I.P. Florian Hufsky
You will not be forgotten.

WHAT?! WHY?!

I have "known" Florian since 2003. I emailed him after I found a homebrew game for my xbox called "Super Mario War 1.1". I had played the game and it was so much fun, that being a fellow coder, I wanted to contribute. The game didn't have powerups yet, for pete's sake

My first impression of Florian was he was this energetic young coder that was full of ideas. He wanted to build and contribute to the free gaming community. He had this idea to create a website called "72dpiarmy.com" (72 dpi being the typical dots per inch on a display) where he wanted to build a community of developers, game designers and players to create free fun games. He wanted SMW to be the first game released under this community.

I went to work adding features to SMW. We would have email exchanges discussing features and implementation details. He showed me his work creating the Jump and Run tutorials http://jnrdev.72dpiarmy.com/ and how SMW used those concepts. The first powerup added to the game was the starman. Then a turbo button was added. He argued we didn't need a turbo button and wanted to keep it simple. I told him he didn't have to use it He created a CVS repository that we could use to collaborate.

Eventually we had enough features that we thought it was time to cut a version. Florian thought we should have a forum for people to discuss and contribute to the game so he created forum.72dpiarmy.com. I didn't think anyone would use it, but he was a believer. Boy was I wrong. We decided on 1.5 as the version number and released it to the community for PC, Mac and xbox. It became crazy popular. People flooded the forum and began contributing maps and skins. Tons and tons of them. Also feature requests. Feature requests that became version 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8.

Talented contributors began to show up and smw started building a loose team. Rom hackers, music and sound composers, map makers, document and html writers, graphic artists, platform porters. It was becoming a "real" open source project. I could see Florian smiling through his emails.

He would send me links to articles or scans of magazines mentioning SMW. He would update me on traffic spikes where popular sites would post a link to our download and we'd get 10,000 downloads a day. Florian was featured on an episode of Gamejew http://blawg.72dpiarmy.com/?p=261. He was inspired by the success and started other projects, including Puit. In his last email to me, he was planning the redesign of the SMW website to coincide with the 1.8 release. I guess I should have released it a little quicker.

You can read his blog here: http://blawg.72dpiarmy.com
His geeq page: http://soup.geeq.at/
Puit on soup: http://puit.soup.io/
SMW on soup: http://smw.soup.io/

Rest in peace, Florian. Your friendship, unique vision and our conversations will truly be missed.

I'll leave you with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3eOIFo_Hrg

I know I should of posted a big sob-worthy group of paragraphs probably when I first posted in this thread but I mind as well get it out of the way now, if you are expecting trolling and otherwise looking for lulz in this post then please kill yourself now and say hi to Florian for me.

Florian was mostly a shrouded mystery for a great chunk of the entire forum, most of us knew him "as that guy with the hat that made the forums and super mario war" but reading through Two52's post made me think "gee this guy really is a bro, and he and Two52 are bros forever." I have to personally thank Florian for bring together this (mostly) great rag-tag team of great people I never would of met in the first place without Super Mario War.

Super Mario War has really come a long way since 2006, when the forum was in a state which I perfectly fittingly call "The Golden Age" of 72dpiarmy, yeah the forum had it's ups and downs but mostly banded together complete strangers due to one common thing: "we love mario and **** yeah!"

So I guess that's all I really do have to type, I never knew Florian personally, but he did a pretty good thing and we should be thankful, if it wasn't for him we probably would of never known each other and probably have no friends at all.

In conclusion:

I never had the time to post on this topic. Might as well do it now.

I have spoken to Florian only once. And that was in the IRC. He was really nice, too. I should have spoken more with him, but who knew that he would die of Suicide?
He created a community which changed my life. Entirely, even. Why? Well i used to have no friends (echo get out of here), irl and in the internet. Today, I have a load of friends that are true
bros. Who is the one that made us know each other? This guy.

This makes me remember of the old times i was here. 2006. 2nd community i went to. Zash, Aubry, Jarviar, Nights and Chaos, WAD Master, those were the good times. My true internet life started here. Metanet was just a preview of what the internet showed me in the next years. Let's not forget the good times we had on IRC. We have evolved and are currently chatting on Skype (well, for the most of us who used IRC). I'm still having a great time in this community, always did, always will. We play games a lot, share cool stories with us bros and always laugh at every day. I have changed since my debut in this community. I owe all of this to Florian, the true bro of 72dpi. 2009 was a bad year for celebrities, i guess you counted as one of them.

Florian might be dead, but the community will live on until the end of time (or until the internet dies).
We won't for get you.
Ever.

IDK about Florian much. It was really sad that I didn't even had the chance to speak with him.

Well, Florian is not just a coder at heart, but a great bridge to anyone of us right here, right now.

Once more, rest in peace.