About BiteTheBytes

Six bytes, one obsession, two decades.

BiteTheBytes started in 2007 as a small group of IT students at Fulda University in Germany. Almost two decades later, we are still a small, focused team that loves what we do. World Creator is our flagship, but the way we build software is what we are really known for.

The team

Faces behind the bytes.

We are a small team. Every person on this list works directly on the products. No layers, no proxies, no outsourcing.

Stefan Kraus

Founder, Managing Director and Programmer

Timo Armbruster

Founder, CTO and Programmer

Prof. Stephan Jacob

Founder, CFO and Programmer

Julius Trasselli

Programmer

Steven Koch

Programmer and Game Designer

Esther Kraus

Graphics and Art

Our story

Two decades of building tools.

Our flagship World Creator has its own long journey behind it, and it is also our company story. We started at a university with a terrain algorithm called CLODDY, partnered with the original GeoControl team, moved to GPU rendering on the Unity Asset Store, built our own engine from scratch, stumbled, recovered, and shipped what we believe is the most complete version yet.

We have never been a giant company with hundreds of employees. We are a small, dedicated team that loves what we do, and we have been working on this craft for over a decade. World Creator is more than software to us. It is our story, our passion, and the thing we have built our lives around.

2007
The beginning: CLODDY
Three IT students at Fulda University of Applied Sciences founded BiteTheBytes with EXIST funding. Our first technology was CLODDY (Continuous Level of Detail), a terrain algorithm that could render entire planets seamlessly. It found its way into planetariums and navigation systems.
2010
First contact: GeoControl
We met Johannes Rosenberg, the creator of GeoControl, a terrain generator from 2006. He wanted to combine his work with ours to add real time visualization. It was the seed for what came years later.
2011
The gathering: World Creator 1
Johannes suffered a stroke and asked us to take over GeoControl. We formed a partnership and launched World Creator 1, stable and robust, but slow on Pure Basic. One founder left that year, but Timo Armbruster joined the team as CTO.
2015
Going GPU: World Creator for Unity
We released World Creator on the Unity Asset Store, the first GPU based terrain generator ever shipped. The entire gaming industry started paying attention.
2017
Standalone: World Creator 2
World Creator 2 shipped for Windows and Mac as a standalone product. Even more successful than the Unity edition, but Unity's limits were showing. We knew we would eventually have to build everything ourselves.
2019
Building from scratch
We started developing our own engine, renderer, and UI framework with C# and Vulkan, no shortcuts. The biggest technical bet in the company's history.
2022
The setback: World Creator 2022
World Creator 2022 shipped, and honestly, it stumbled. The UI was clunky, the workflow confusing, and many users stayed on WC2. The pandemic stress did not help. But we are stubborn nerds who have been coding since childhood, and giving up was never an option.
2023
The comeback: World Creator 2023
We redesigned the interface, fixed the workflow, and added features. World Creator 2023 brought the community back.
2025
A new era: World Creator 2025
World Creator 2025 brought everything together, the strengths of WC2, years of improvements, and a foundation for what comes next with hardware ray tracing, workflow improvements, video export, and deeper engine integrations. The same year, we started building a brand new product of our own, Byte Installer.
2026
The family grows
In January we released World Creator 2026. In June, Byte Installer followed, which makes building desktop installers feel like editing a document instead of fighting a build system. In August, Material Creator joined the lineup, a node based tool for procedural PBR materials that stay editable. In September, Byte Editor arrived, a text, markup and code editor with Canvas boards and an expressive typing layer of its own. After two decades around a single product, we have become a small studio with a real family of tools.
Next
What's next: our own game engine
We are building our own game engine, made exclusively for voxel games and optimized for nothing else. It takes the clarity and simplicity of Unity and the no code approach of Unreal, where you build game logic from nodes instead of writing code. A first alpha is planned before the end of 2026.

Recognition

Certified innovation, supported from day one.

Four marks we are proud of, from the founder grant of 2007 to the innovation seal of 2026. They stand for the same thing: a small team from Fulda building technology that holds up.

EXIST founder grant, 2007

EXIST, the startup program of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, funded three IT students from Fulda and their terrain technology in 2007. That grant became BiteTheBytes.

About EXIST

European Innovative Games Award, 2010

Our terrain technology, which also drives World Creator, won the Advancement Prize of the European Innovative Games Award 2010 in the Innovative Technology category, in a field that included Crytek’s CryEngine 3 and Microsoft’s Kinect.

Hessischer Gründerpreis, first place 2013

In 2013 BiteTheBytes took first place at the Hessischer Gründerpreis, the founders award of the state of Hesse. A young team with a terrain technology, and a jury that believed in it.

About the Hessischer Gründerpreis

BSFZ seal for innovation competence, 2026

The Bescheinigungsstelle Forschungszulage, the certification office for the German research allowance, reviewed our research and development projects and certified them. The seal marks that certification for 2026.

About the BSFZ seal

Social responsibility

Supporting young talent

WorldSkills Germany helps young people shine at the start of their careers, championing skilled trades and professions through national and international competitions.

We are a small company with a limited budget. We still believe we share a responsibility for the world around us, so we give what we can to support their work.