Programmer by Day (and Night)

Ok so maybe my career and hobby are essentially the same thing, but I’m not just a programmer. I do have hobbies that don’t require a computer, I promise. Living in Washington—one of the most beautiful places in the world—I get outside as much as I can, even if I need vitamin D supplements half the year.

The Game Dev Journey 🎮

I’ve always been a bit obsessed with making things. I won my first science award in first grade with a small robot I made, and then around age 10 I got really into high powered rockets. I can still feel the blisters on my hands from manually sanding the fiberglass for practically 2 days straight. It was about this same time though that my friend introduced me to Quake 2. I had been a gamer since my introduction to Super Mario Bros 3, but Quake 2 gave me something I had never seen before: the console. Never had I been able to tinker with a game’s mechanics, outside of cheat codes anyway.

Eventually I learned that I could download the Quake 2 client source. I of course had zero clue what I was looking at, but I wanted to learn. This was roughly around the time I was starting high school. After spending a few months poking through the code, a senior friend of mine suggested I learn C++ instead. I studied and spent every bit of time I could writing console apps until eventually I decided to try and tackle the Windows GUI app section... 300+ LOC later I had a blank window on the screen... hurrah.

However, this pretty quickly led me to learning OpenGL. At the time, OpenGL still had a rigid render-pipeline - shaders weren’t a thing yet, but I figured out how to render a heightmap and spawn a few Quake 2 MD5 models pretty quickly. Keep in mind this was around the same time the original World of Warcraft was first released. I eventually became fairly obsessed with the idea of creating my own game engine - which in retrospect was probably a mistake and I probably should have focused on creating mods, but it wasn’t a total waste of time. This forced me to learn 3D math, how to structure and manage a large project, learn design patterns, etc.

I really thought back then that I was fully set to join a AAA game studio at any time, but reality never really ends up being how you imagined it. Around 17 I began working at a PC repair shop. It was a lot of fun for a while, but you can only fix so many printers, or re-install Windows so many times before realizing it may not be the path you want to stay going down, and so one day I decided to blow off work and head down to the local college I had begun attending to ask them if there were any entry level programming jobs available. I figured that at least gaining some real world experience as a programmer would help me land a game development role eventually.

The Startup Phase

At this point I had been working as a web developer for several years. Kevin Rose and Diggnation inspired me to try my hand at creating my own startup. A few years later and multiple failed attempts to get anything off the ground, I began working at a casino game company in Las Vegas. This is where I met my close friend Ben Powell which eventually led to us creating a startup focused on mobile ordering and payments. Sadly things didn’t turn out the way we had hoped for reasons I won’t go into, but we did get our product in front of several customers and even did a live trial run in Toronto.

Over the next few years I pitched one idea after the other, but the market had become overly saturated. Sure, there are still new companies popping up all of the time. I’m not saying it would have been impossible, but location, money, and connections really make all the difference. However, to be honest, I realized that the reason I was failing to come up with a “great idea” was simply that, I wasn’t passionate about creating the next killer app. The reason I even started down the path of software development was because I wanted to create video games.

With this realization, I decided to call it quits on the whole startup phase. Even if I couldn’t ever create a million dollar video game, at least I could have fun working on them.

The Return to Game Dev

Video games were always my real passion, well more accurately, the idea of creating my own games was really where my heart was. However I tried to stay realistic about it. It’s very easy to see success stories and believe “that’s going to be me one day” but in reality, only a fraction of people who decide they’re going to create a game actually succeed. It’s an incredible amount of work to even finish a small pixel art game. Of course I wanted to create the next Genshin Impact but I knew this was completely in the realm of impossible, but perhaps I could create something like it, just drastically smaller in scale.

This time around though I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes I did as a teenager. My goal was to create a game, not an entire game development ecosystem, and so I decided to learn Unity. I had already had some practical experience with C# so that wasn’t a problem. However while I made some progress, I really didn’t have the experience or knowledge yet, so many of my early projects were really just for education.

In 2021 after playing Death’s Door I began digging into the developers’ background and found a video interview with them talking about their development process. This was very eye-opening to me but also kind of led me astray. I became overly focused on level design, even going so far as to learn Blender, but the issue was, I didn’t actually know what I was making yet.

Currently

After putting a pause on game development for several months, I decided to try and re-approach how I went about doing things. This time around I started with a game design document. Once I worked out the core concept and mechanics, I began working on a prototype - no level design, no art, nothing pretty or fancy, just a raw focus on making it work. That’s pretty much where I still am today. My prototype has come along pretty well. I’ve developed most of the core functionality, and my capsule characters are running around serving their purpose.

The Goal

Well, on October 2nd, 2025 I learned that the department I had spent the last 5 years working in was shut down. This came as a pretty big shock, but in a way it provided me with what I had been wishing for: time to focus on my game development. My goal now is to finish the remaining tasks on the prototype and to begin the pre-production phase within the next few weeks. Maybe this time around will be different. Maybe this time I’ll finally be able to call myself a true indie game developer.

Final Thoughts

Maybe my ambition is still a bit too high. After all we’ve seen a surge of games hit the market recently that makes me want to punch myself; they’re not AAA, they’re not even A - but they’re fun, and that’s really what matters. A game is meant to be fun. It doesn’t need a complicated story, it doesn’t need beautiful graphics, it doesn’t even need complicated mechanics, so long as people enjoy playing it, that’s really all that matters. Maybe I’m just a lot more dumb than I care to admit, but for me, story matters. Creating worlds in which players want to explore matters. Maybe I should create a much smaller game and focus exclusively on the fun factor - I’ve certainly been told that I should several times now, and maybe I do, maybe I get super lucky and make a few million dollars that could go towards funding my passion project. Maybe that’s the smart move, but I just can’t seem to convince myself it’s the right move for me.