A New Day: Reigniting My Passion For Game Development
One day, back in early 2012, I wanted to make my own video games. I made what I thought was a very uncharacteristically impulsive decision to enroll in a small private school to learn how to do so. In late 2014 I graduated with a shiny degree, a good amount of skill in programming and design, knowledge of how to use the Unity engine, and a bit too large of an ego. Surely, I thought, the world was my oyster now.
It’s been about six and a half years since, and I was still waiting for my great career to just fall into my lap. I eventually realized that I would need to work a little harder for it.
Of course, I wasn’t just lying in bed for that entire time. Every now and then inspiration would hit me and I would feverishly work for a day or two on some new project that would make me an overnight sensation, only to burn out just as fast. There was only one time in which I was hit by inspiration particularly hard.
I considered this a really neat demo that including procedurally generated terrain and a custom character controller that swaps dynamically between flying and running. Yet it still never saw the light of day, mostly because I didn’t know how to turn it into an actually fun game without spending about two more years on it.
So here I am in 2021, now 31 years old, just scraping by as a self-employed online tutor. More than once I thought that my destiny was just to become a high-school Calculus teacher and spend the rest of my days as a video game player and not a creator. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
I don’t even remember how this happened, but somehow my bits of inspiration in the last few years had led me to subscribe to GameDevHQ, and recently its founder Jonathan Weinberger held a seminar on their Professional Unity Developer Program. He talked about how many opportunities there are for Unity devs, and what it would take to make it in the industry. Not only that, but he outlined a plan for how I could make that happen, if only I put in the necessary work.
Finally, after wandering in a dark forest for six and a half years, it’s as if I found the signboard that points a direction and is labeled “This way”. I’ve decided to follow that sign, and do everything I can to make my dream job a reality. Call me impulsive if you like, but I still have time to give this another shot, and this time I’m not going to let anything hold me back.
If game development is something that interests you, then feel free to follow along with me. I’m going to post an article on Medium every day, documenting my progress, my challenges, and how I overcome them. If I can finally make it, then so can you.
