Take Everything from Your Life and Become What You Want to Be

The Story begins on a warm summer day, I was sitting in the office behind a desk all day working when suddenly my colleague came up and said to me:

“I know that you have studied programming some time ago. Do you want to develop an indie computer game with me, I am good at designing computer games, but I am not so good at writing code and I have a great idea how everything can be arranged. ”

Actually, yes, I studied programming, but my knowledge would be enough to output Hello World text and maybe I can make some ordinary arithmetic operations, but obviously not for writing a full game. Of course, without thinking twice, I said yes.

At the moment I am doing an internship in one large international it-company and I can surely say that this was the most important YES in my life, which completely turned my world upside down from an ordinary person into a binary world.

After talking with my colleague, I went home and began to look up for programs which I can use to start developing an ordinary simple game. I also tried to search for some courses to slightly improve my knowledge of programming languages.

My code was just awful in the beginning. I was copying someone’s code and tried to manage it somehow for our game. Sometimes, I didn’t even understand what was written in it and why some operators were needed and what they were doing here.

But the game somehow worked and in this way we created the environment, enemies and our main character. All this was very interesting and was trying to develop our game every day after work.

Gaining more and more knowledge in the process of developing our game, we decided that it was time to show it to at least some people so that they would give us their feedback. But the game was so raw that even the main menu didn’t work properly.

As a result, the game did not qualify, but we spent a great evening testing the games of other developers and communicating with them.

After a break, we decided that it was a time to restart the project and make it more unique, add a bunch of different additional features and those we need to switch to a new game engine. There was already enough knowledge to understand someone else’s code.

But over time, the demand for our game grew we were adding more and more new things and the game began to look more like Skyrim in 2D, rather than a regular simple indie game. I understood that my knowledge was not enough for further work on the game and I decided to take a break. I went to the courses and spend a huge amount of time learning programming languages.

But as it usually happens, in the end, the spark died and my designer began to slowly throw our game. A while ago we wanted to close the project or remake it again. As a result, now this game is in my //TODO list, waiting for a designer who wants to finish it.

As a result, the project that was abandoned led me to a deeper study of programming languages, databases, as well as data structures and algorithms. After some time I decided to apply for an internship at the company, where I calmly passed all the tests and was able to become a part of the development team.

I don’t regret my decision of becoming a Software Engineer. You never know what you can expect from life, and what challenges it holds for you.