Timeline

I completed my high school internship at Meteor Makina in the Hadımköy Industrial Zone. It was a factory that manufactured industrial welding machines, and I participated in the production of the machines' electrical panels. It was an excellent hands-on training opportunity for me to apply what I had learned in high school regarding electricity and panels.

When my internship there ended, I made a request to the factory management. I had learned that the electronic boards used in the panels were manufactured and coded by a company in Istanbul called Flaks Industrial Systems. I asked if they could send me there. They kindly made a request on my behalf to the manufacturer, and in addition to my standard internship, I worked for about two months at the place where these 'electronic brains' were produced. During this time, I worked on tasks ranging from soldering the tiniest components of electronic boards to preparing them for shipment.

The company owner and chief engineer frequently gave me assignments and mentored me. In high school, we were accustomed to learning everything from books; we didn't use the internet much. Back then, we rarely saw it used for anything other than watching videos. However, it was there that I learned how to use the internet to self-improve on technical subjects. This was a pivotal change that would influence my decisions and lifestyle in the years to come.

I completed my university internship at the IT department of Sabancı Holding's headquarters in 4. Levent. There, I was responsible for a wide range of tasks, from troubleshooting company computers to system maintenance and installation. Working in system management and administration at one of Turkey's largest companies was a unique experience for me. I improved myself significantly by learning valuable lessons about white-collar business life and how the information technologies of a corporation with tens of thousands of employees operate.

My way of learning is by reasoning and understanding the problems and solutions. I don't think the memorized knowledge is persistent. This is how I taught in my high school years. However, university exams required us to memorize the long PDF files to answer detailed questions instead of testing our understanding and reasoning skills. Some of our teachers were not able to answer their own questions.

The high level of technical education in my high school years made me feel like I was not learning anything new at the university. Therefore, I decided to drop out of the university and start my self-taught career.

The first thing I did was to take IBM's Data Science Specialization course. AI was not a hot topic, but I was interested in it. As I learned more about AI, I felt myself weak because without large data sets, I wasn't able to produce any meaningful results. I thought it was pushing me to be an employee in a big company, but I had dreams to achieve. I needed to build something meaningful for this world. I must continue on my journey!

During my time in the UK, I saw a lot of people practicing driving license theory tests. So, I thought it would be a good idea to develop a gamified version to practice the tests without getting bored. I published the game on the Google Play Store and tried to market it.

However, the mobile app market is too competitive, and I had zero budget to market the game. Therefore, I decided to archive the game and focus on other projects. It was a great experience for me, and I learned a lot from it. I'm glad I did it.

I was accepted to the BTM Incubation Hub. We had a lot of valuable lectures and workshops to learn about business development and entrepreneurship. I found opportunities to connect with other entrepreneurs and investors.

I published the first app of my startup called Japanese Warrior. It was aimed to be a quick, session-based game to learn Hiragana, Katakana, and some basic words and phrases. I developed an advanced algorithm to maximize the comprehension of the user, instead of a linear learning process that we see in the most common apps in the market, like Duolingo and Busuu.

My end goal was to create a language-learning-oriented metaverse for learners to live in the local environment to comprehend the language properly. While I was designing that metaverse, I found myself designing a bigger metaverse where humanity starts from scratch and builds a civilization from the ground up. My love for history and gaming pushed me in this direction without me even noticing it.

Around the same time, crypto was a hot topic, and I allocate significant portion of my time to learn about it. My first introduction to crypto was in the latter part of the 2017 bull market. I lost most of my investment at that time and lost my interest in crypto. However, it came back as the experienced "Crypto Bros" said. I thought they proved themself and I decided to learn more about it to achieve success this time.

As I learned more about crypto, I was amazed by the technology and the philosophy behind it. Up until that time, it was dummy internet money for me. As I learned the technology, I saw its potential. That made me redesign Metalife to be fully on-chain and decentralized. It would be a real metaverse, and blockchain can make it possible. Owned and governed by people, built by incentives! You can watch the trailer of Metalife here.

I've invited to the Business Channel Turk TV to talk about the Metaverse and Blockchain. The metaverse was a hot topic at the time, and my experience caught the attention of the producer. I tried to do my best to explain the metaverse and blockchain to the audience. It was a great experience for me! You can watch the video here.

A fully on-chain metaverse required a lot of complex contracts to be designed and developed. Therefore, I decided to develop an experimental project to push my technical skills to achieve what I need. This is how I started to develop Stick Fights. Minimalistic visuals but complex on-chain architecture and mechanics. It took me almost a year to develop the on-chain architecture and mechanics.

While I was building a great on-chain system and testing those intensively, I started to run out of money to continue the development without a job or incentives. The crypto market collapsed, and we were in a bear market. I had to pause my personal goals at that time.

I developed a game prototype with my game designer friends Ege Barış Öncü and Meltem Yurttaş. Their idea was to build a bullet hell game where the player builds their own hell for the next level. We created +30 Turret types and +10 buffs and nerfs to allow player to create their own strategy. I was developing the game as a side-project alongside my full-time job at Dynasty Studios. This project stayed as a prototype, and we didn't continue it.

Shortly after I founded my company, I joined Quills Adventure as a developer. Just like its name, we had a real adventure ahead of us. Quills team hit the Somnia Network in its heart and won the support of the community. Before Quills, the Somnia community was not that big and the network itself was not widespread in the market. Quills was about to change it!

Somnia needed a mascot to represent the network and the community. Our designer designed a cute and friendly mascot, Somini. We won the first competition on Discord to join the Somnia Mascot Competition.

The main competition was an on-chain competition, and it gave me the opportunity to develop an on-chain Somini Builders Program to incentivize the community to support Somini and win on-chain NFT badges to represent their support. Somini won the competition and Somini became the mascot of the Somnia Network!

As we kept building the community and waiting for the mainnet launch, we needed a new entertainment and on-chain application to keep the community engaged and interact with the network. Therefore, I developed a mini-game for Quills NFT holders to send their Quill NFTs on an adventure for certain periods of time and collect rewards accordingly to build up a base for the Somini!

If a holder transfers or sells their NFT, they lose their progress and rewards. This mini on-chain game helped us to increase our branding and community engagement, test the royalty of the holders, as well as helped holders to showcase their royalties.

It was one of the few on-chain apps on Somnia Testnet alongside being a fun mini game! Even the CEO of Somnia, Paul was playing it!

As we head into the Somnia Mainnet, we needed to migrate all of Quills NFTs to the mainnet. We sought a solution in the market to make it easier for me while I was working on both the game and the new collection. Unfortunately, we couldn't find any reliable solution to use. The best option was the LayerZero bridge, but it was creating a new problem for us in terms of OpenSea integration.

Therefore, I had to develop our own bridge to migrate the NFTs. The bridge was tested by the CEO of Somnia, Paul, and it worked perfectly, and we were able to migrate Quills safely to the main network. Quills was the first NFT project that could migrate to the Somnia Network. The total value of the Quills NFTs migrated was between +$3M and +$5M. Due to the size of the money, it was quite stressful but a great achievement for me.

We exhibited our game at Tokyo Game Show 2025 and got a lot of positive feedback from the audience. It was a huge milestone for myself and for the project! You can watch our TGS video here.

As the first year of my company was coming to an end, I started to work on a new project called Somini Fights for a private client. The game is currently in development, and we are conducting playtests with the Somnia community. We are building everything on-chain in this game to utilize the full potential of the technology.