I’ve been meaning to start a programming blog for well over a decade now, so it’s about time. I’ve been in the game industry as a programmer in various capacities since about 2004, and I have been programming games in some form since I think sometime in the early 90s - starting on an Apple IIc with BASIC, eventually doing some LPmud stuff, and then playing with graphical stuff in highschool.
I left my last job at the end of 2025, with the intent to take some time to decompress, and then work on my own project. This is a pretty scary thing to do in today’s world - everything is quite uncertain. But I decided I needed to do it, and the timing was right for me and with my then employer. My project started off as a neat demo, to be accompanied by a plan to write technical blog posts and little dev log micro-updates about whatever I was learning.
For various reasons, the project has turned into a game/game engine. I might still do the technical blog posts, but I’ve found that most of the time when I’m motivated to write out my thoughts, it’s often about some industry conversation, or random thoughts about engines, programming languages, or now the unavoidable topic of AI, and how that affects us both in the industry and in general.
So- my game & engine. It started as a mini-graphics demo and has grown in scope, mostly driven by my own curiosity and desire to build the thing I wanted to build. It’s still code-first in many places, to manage scope, and much of what I’m building is for a particular kind of game. If you listen to the average internet advice, you might be tempted to conform and use an off-the-shelf engine, because it’s the ‘smart’ thing to do. Why waste time building something that already exists? Well, for starters, making choices to the prescription of others has been a source of significant (self-imposed?) discomfort in my life. This is even more true if those others are strangers on the internet who don’t actually care if you succeed or not. Additionally, I find that the big engines just aren’t fun for me to use, and while certainly capable, they also remove a lot of what I enjoy about this field. There’s also just an enormous amount of tedium and friction in making it do exactly what you actually want.
Despite that, it’s still an enormous undertaking, but something I’ve wanted to do ever since I got interested in working on games in the late 90s. What I’ve realized while working on this is that I’m not sure I’m totally doing this for the purposes of a commercial venture. It would obviously be great if that worked out, but I just really need to make this thing and do it my way. No engines, no vibe code, building (nearly) every system the way I want it. I’ve dedicated a good portion of my life to learning how to build games and game technology, and haven’t really had the chance to do all the things I wanted yet. At this point with the way things are going, between engines, the health of the industry, and AI, I’m not sure what it looks like to be a game developer who wants to build tech and make things from scratch going forward. For the moment, this project feels like answering a calling.
Once I’m done, perhaps I won’t feel the urge to go home and try to make my own stuff just to see if I can, or out of some sort of unhealthy resentment that I’m not working on the part of the project I want to. Maybe that will have run its course. Maybe I will even find another path as a career, going forward. I really don’t know yet. My time in game dev, while it has been a dream forever, has been somewhat unsatisfying to me as a career - I’ve never quite been able to get what I want out of it, and rarely have worked on the kind of games I wanted to make, and even more rarely have had the opportunity to contribute how I wanted to. At this point I feel like I’ve paid my dues and it’s time to make time for my own ambitions.
In terms of taking a break from work, it has taken a lot longer to decompress than I thought it would. I still have residual stress about scheduling working time around meetings I don’t even have anymore. I also put a lot of stress on myself to make something financially viable as soon as possible, which perhaps came from the social pressure of having to explain “what you’re up to”.
On the upside, almost every day I can self-direct my own work, which has been a complete joy. The depth and variety of what I choose to work on is so liberating. By way of example, I took a detour from graphics engine stuff into text rendering, which led naturally into a UI system, and then a small detour into algorithms for text editing for my text entry widget. Now I have a lot more understanding of why font & text can be tricky, and an appreciation for the challenges in UI layout (it’s just full of chicken & egg problems), and even some understanding of how working on a word processor could be interesting, at least at the core level. I basically do not have bad days due to work now, and when I do, it’s because some self-imposed constraint, like making this complex thing should take 2 days, not a week.
I’m certainly learning a lot and enjoying myself, and maybe I can share some of that here. Maybe I’ll just talk about how programming in C is amazing compared to C++, or what I think about AI, or a semi-private response to something silly I saw on the internet. I look forward to sharing here, in any case, whether anyone reads it or not!