I just recently became redundant due to the closure of Hypixel Studios and the cancellation of Hytale, I figured now was a good time to talk about how I ended up in this position and how I plan to move forward.
Some of my earliest gaming memories are playing a rugrats game on the PS1, getting a Gameboy Colour with Pokémon Yellow and playing Dark Cloud, Prince of Persia and GTA 3 on my dad's PS2 these were just some of the earliest memories that formed my childhood, games have been a constant throughout my life.
I played the obscure flash games, I played old school RuneScape before it was old and I played Roblox when it was still in its infancy, I hopped around every free mmorpg I could find and I watched game technology grow and mature alongside me, seeing the early stages of the internet and how drastically things have changed over my 28 years of existence.
I started my game development journey un-officially in late 2015 / early 2016, before that my closest experience to working in games was acting as a voluntary chat moderator for the OhGaming Modded Minecraft network (The stories I could tell from my time there are horrifying honestly).
At this point in time I started experimenting with MMORPG private server development, It’s what kickstarted my passion for exploring how games work, nothing quite compares to jumping into a vs 2005 korean source code-base for an mmorpg built ontop of the Gamebryo engine with 0 documentation and broken / limited tooling.
After a few years I went on to become the founder of the Dragonica Games community, backed by the most prolific and experienced / popular Dragonica Private Servers, establishing a small but passionate discord community keeping the game alive, breaking away from the hostile & greed focused private server communities online to solely focus on public knowledge & resource sharing.
Through community driven efforts we slowly untangled the mysterious inner-workings of this huge code-base, we discovered & resolved economy devestating exploits, reverse-engineered how assets were created & implemented in-game, discovered workflows & processes that allowed us to build every element of content from custom maps with their own collisions, custom enemies with their own animations & so much more.
One of my proudest accomplishments was building, together with my friend who is a professional web/software developer, a completely functional dynamic Day/Night cycle for this mmorpg that originally did not support it, including triggering custom events to change the Music based on the time of day & making enemies glow during night time.
I took a long mental health break after leaving school and putting myself in hospital, followed by failing 2 years of an Interactive Media college course by not submitting any of my final work (due to not completing it) and skipping more classes than I attended due to mental health struggles.
It wasn’t until 2021 after attending a mental health service known as Action Mental Health, that I went back to College at the young age of 25 to pursue Game Development.
I had been slowly stepping away from my Private Server work (though It’s important to note that was always unpaid and voluntary) and learning how to use Unity in my spare time and was finally ready to push myself forward into a career I had always dreamed of having, It’s my hunger and pursuit for understanding how games work and how to make them work that set me off on this journey.
I applied to the Northern Regional College with the support of the Adult ASD Service, for a Creative Media Practice (Digital Games) course and was accepted in.
This came with the caveat that I completely lost access to my goverment benefits, in my pursuit for bettering my education so I could enter the work-force I was put into a difficult position where I now wouldn’t be able to afford to attend college due to train fare fees and being too old to recieve a tavel pass, not only that but the goverment also decided to overpay me and put me into debt for it, this was a new low for me because I was finally pushing myself towards a better future and was immediately hit with pushback.
I luckily was able to get approved for a Further Education grant that allowed me to stay in college and graduate.
It wasn’t until I started attending The course that I realised just how much of an impact my hobbyist experience had set me up for success, not everyone has a background in Private Server development (It’s a really shady grey area) but it does provide a unique opportunity to develop skills and expertise that are almost impossible to find anywhere else.
I learnt how to operate, query and update databases for an mmorpg, I learnt how to deploy patches to a live server, I got to experience building entire in-game event content completely by myself for players to enjoy.
Through private server development I had the chance to work on and learn every part of game development on a large-scale project that already exists, you can't find that opportunity anywhere else prior to working in the games industry.
For the first time in my life I started to not only meet expectations but exceed them, I enjoyed learning in college so much that In the initial lessons I would write-up notes on the topics we covered each day and share them with the other students, I would often take time away from my own work and learnings to help others because I could and was at an advantage, I became a class representative and then also went through the process of becoming a peer mentor too.
That is not to say that college was easy, I find education settings very challenging due to being neurodivergent, however the key difference was that I was actually enjoying learning game development and it's something I was previously spending all my free time doing at home.
Towards the end of my final year at college I had to start thinking about my future and what would be next for me, I was 25 turning 26 and university could take 3-4 years I didn't want to stay in education for that long without working and I knew for a fact I wouldn't be able to handle university and part time work at the same time.
While I was looking into opportunities I came across The Pixel Mill’s Trainee Programmers Bootcamp (2022 which was delayed into 2023) funded/organized by Northern Ireland Screen.
“The Pixel Mill Trainee Programmers 2022 is an industry-led new entrant paid training programme (RLW) that seeks to find and develop the best new and emerging talent within the video game and immersive industries, providing them with training and live project experience.”
This bootcamp was starting at the same time I was in my final year of college, the final assignment of our second year was worth 50% of our final grade too, I was unsure whether or not I would be able to commit to both, I was so close to finishing the course and had been working really hard to accomplish the best possible results, I did not want to have to drop out right at the end. I had pretty wonderful tutors who I was able to sit down and discuss options with, although It would be challenging, I knew that I wanted to pursue this opportunity, I really wanted to get involved in the local games industry