February 2022, after a year of not fully knowing what to do, I decided to dive headfirst into a dream I had since I was 11 years old.
That dream being to make video games. Before this point I’d only really dabbled in game related projects here and there, I had some knowledge of how to use unity but I had never made a proper game, or at least not one I could show to anyone. I did have some coding knowledge because of my computer science degree but that’s pretty much all I was coming in with.
The Learning Phase
So between February and March I mainly wanted to learn and make diverse projects that would help me learn multiple skills. This is when I found The Game Design and Development Specialization on Coursera. These are 4 online courses offered together by the Michigan State University that walk you through 4 different projects, namely a 2d shooter along the lines of asteroids, a 2d platformer, something like mario, a 3d shooter, think first person doom and a 3d platformer; while also teaching you about different aspects of game design like how to form a story or design levels and mechanics.
By the way, this Post is not sponsored by coursera but here’s the link for this specialization: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/game-design-and-development
Don’t worry about paying, just audit the courses and its all free to follow.
During these courses I tried really hard to make sure I wasn’t just casually going through but actually trying to learn as well as trying my hardest to make sure I put effort into my projects instead of just make whatever was required. After completing these courses, actually I don’t I ever completed the last one but after the first 3, I had 3 projects to show the world under my belt.
At this point I decided I was ready to start applying to game developer roles, I also desperately needed work at this time so this was also a move of necessity. After countless job applications and hoping for responses, I actually landed an interview at a small game studio working on a mobile game, but before they hired me they required me to take a test. This test really told me how little I knew at the time about unity, it consisted of some programming questions and some questions about specific things in unity, at this point I didn’t even know what an awake function was or what fixed update did, So needless to say I didn’t do well and I didn’t really hear from that company again. This was sort of a blow to my confidence but I figured I’d keep looking for opportunities and making games in the mean time.
Then April came about and I heard that a new Ludum Dare Game Jam was about to occur. If you don’t know what ludum dare is or what a game jam is, a game jam is basically a competition where you’re given a theme and a set amount of time and you have to make a game using the theme and other restrictions in that time. Ludum Dare is one of the internets oldest game jams, I remember having seen posts about ludum dare when I was like 12 and scrolling new grounds. So I decided to take part in Ludum Dare 50 during the first weekend of April 2022.
The theme for the jam was delay the inevitable. After some brainstorming I came up with the idea of physically running away from death and being a bad driver and the short story I came up with for this was that, you the character have been a reckless driver for a long time and so death has come to take you, but you quickly evade and try to run away in your car onto on coming traffic and avoid death as much as you can. Thus reckless reaper was made, an endless runner about avoiding on coming traffic and death itself.
While this was a fairly simple game I got to practice a bunch of game design techniques I had learned during the coursera course which felt like I had really learned something beyond just putting a game together. Like how if you stay in 1 lane for too long death will appear in a faster black car and force you to switch lanes, also if a car gets too close to the player it starts honking its horn basically giving you another audio cue to react and also indicating a close call. Lastly the hit box on the player car is actually way smaller than the car itself so other cars actually need to be almost halfway through the the player car before it actually ends the game giving the player much more leeway. All of these simple design techniques were probably things I hadn’t have thought of had I not taken some time to actually learn about design and how to make games more fun.
Getting Professional
Ludum Dare restored some confidence in me about making games and also made me realize how I could build a bunch of different things and also learn how different types of games work while doing so, so between April and May I kept making different types of small games that just consisted of 1 or 2 mechanics, this included a top down sword swinging game, a top down car with drift and one of those subway surfer-esque third person runners.
Around this time I also saw a post for Code Coven’s Summer Game Developer Program, this was an 8 week long bootcamp created by Code Coven and Facebook gaming where a bunch of teams would make some complete games under the guidance of industry professionals. At this point I was fairly uncertain about qualifying for anything in games but I applied anyway because I thought it couldn’t really hurt. And then midway through June I got an email. The email said code coven really appreciated my application and wanted to interview me to make sure I was the person on the application and confirm that I qualified for the program. This was my second ever interview in anything related to games and after having failed one prior I was really nervous, but I really didn’t need to be as it went really well and myself and the interviewer ended up just talking about cool games we both liked. A week after the interview and I was invited to Code Coven’s Game Developer Bootcamp.
By the way for anyone wanting to get into games I highly recommend code coven and looking into other game dev career acceleration and mentorship organizations. I met so many amazing people during the GDP program both peers trying to get into the games industry in various roles and also veterans ready to help with guidance and knowledge, quite a few of whom I’m still in touch with.
The game developer program lasted about 10 weeks and during this time my team and I worked on Moo Cafe. A visual novel and puzzle game about food memories. I got to learn quite a bit about mobile game development as well as optimization during the development of this game. Dabbling in quite a few intermediate and advanced concepts such as objected oriented design techniques and unity’s scriptable objects. After the GDP program I was confident once more about finding work in games and so I started applying again, this time reaching out to specific people, trying to utilize the industry connections I’d made during GDP and seeing where that takes me.
Here’s when another reality set in, you see I’m from Pakistan and the game industry in Pakistan isn’t very big, most companies here are either outsource contracters or working on very small mobile games. I figured for the best opportunities I had to apply for remote positions and here’s another truth I learned about remote work; while it may seem that so many companies are remote friendly nowadays there’s a few caveat’s to this, a company may state it’s remote friendly but then in the same breath state that it would only hire people who are remote in the same city or country as the company, you can guess why that’s a problem for me and countless other creatives who want to work in games but are simply not in the right place.
This was a heartbreaking realization but I didn’t let it deter me as much. I just figured I would keep trying to improve myself and keep applying, either I’ll strike diamond while leveling up and making games or find some cool place that wants me regardless of where I’m from.
Landing The First Gig
Around September some fellow Allums from GDP and I decided to team up and take part in another Game Jam, this being the GBJAM, the restrictions of this game jam were to make a game that would have the limitations of a game on an actual old gameboy, so only a 4 color palette and a fixed very tiny resolution. Through 10 days of jamming we created “Plant! At the end of the world” a side scroller about a cloud collecting raindrops to revive the last plant in an extremely polluted world. We made this game using GBStudio which allowed it to be run on actual Gameboy hardware, working through this jam really allowed me to learn to design and develop under huge limitations and helped a lot in learning about optimizing things to work in very small sizes, for reference the Gameboy can only display 8 sprites on screen at a time and this was quite a difficult thing to design around.
After GBJam I felt a bit more comfortable with the idea of making many small game projects and so I would continue researching multiple types of systems and their limitations, this lead me to find a person who specialized in making modern games for retro consoles, I got talking with them and showed them our Gameboy game which they really enjoyed, so much so that they offered me to do it with them, and that’s how I got my long term position at Retroguru.com where I’m currently helping make new games for older systems.
I also continue to work on my own projects, currently working on a game that I’ve been calling Martian red, a simple platformer about a cute little Martian, while I grow my skills and look for more future opportunities. This Post is more about what I’ve done however and not what I plan to do, since I don’t know how these plans will work out I would only rather talk about things I’ve done in hopes that it may help other developers, if you’ve made it all the way through, thanks for reading and consider subscribing and following on Twitter for more posts about my journey as a game developer.