Career Aspirations
Since I was little, the goal I have aspired to achieve is to make games that inspire people and touch their hearts. I feel that my place is within a larger company – pushing my skills to the limit to create the games that move the industry forward, with always the most cutting-edge technology at my side.
In my course's second year, we have a much larger focus during our independent studies on what kind of programmer we want to be in the industry. There are innumerable options, but I think my passions lie well within the confines of the highly sought-after Technical Artist – the previous work that I have found fascinating and motivating was when I was developing tools for artistry, procedurally generating terrain models for SolarSprite being one of my favourite undertakings. I also love making shaders – both node-based and code-based – and creating tools for artists to work with in group projects. As the only group member comfortable with artistry and code, I already work as a technical artist in the university's more minor projects, usually transferring UV and animation data into a game engine.
In all honesty – even if I work on the most (to my eye) mundane sectors of a game, I'm still very passionate – I just love coding! As such, I'm happy working as a generalist programmer, too – which makes the idea of an indie studio alluring, primarily having worked on games alone before.
I would not be surprised if I returned to the indie development style one day. Still, at least for the foreseeable future, a far larger company would provide a beyond-valuable learning experience for me – the way I see it, there's no better way to improve my code than to see how industry veterans solve their coding problems!