Learning to Pivot, the hard way.

This is my journey as a professional game developer that never started but taught me something.

Being the avid gamer I was during my school day I had decided that I wanted to go into the field of game development from the very early days of my school life. It fascinated me to even imagine that there are people in the world who have full-time 'jobs' of playing games before they are released on the best computers there are, yes I'm talking about game testers, and from there I thought what's better than making those games? I started exploring how games are made and soon discovered that there are so many radically different roles associated with it from the creation of artwork to writing the game logic and most importantly designing the game and its game mechanics.

I started this journey by learning Unity game engine to make games and soon after I began I was interning at the Department of Psychology, DU, and from there in DRDO. The projects are given to me at both organizations aiming towards creating simulation projects to validate (or invalidate) psychological hypotheses of PhDs in the field. As somebody very curious about how the mind works, I used to read about it in articles and blogs since my school days. It was a dream come true for me to work in these two fields I felt so passionate about.

I used to spend hours and hours talking to the brilliant minds there and asking questions going through my head and sometimes ideas related to the projects at hand :p

From there on I started creating cool stuff in Unity and the best thing about it is that you get to see from the very initial stages what you're making which motivates you to keep building. The projects I was working on were aimed towards the validation of hypothesis through VR immersion and sometimes with eye tracking where we had even used EEG to monitor the brain waves of the subjects. I thoroughly enjoyed what I did every day.

The projects were logic (read coding) heavy but not so much on artwork. There was not much emphasis on the artwork, maybe because till that time something like a game engine was not much used at these organizations; with the primary tools being the likes of MATLAB and the experiments of drastically different types.

So for the artwork also called assets in the game dev lingo I used to look up online and find something suitable for the need and my primary focus stayed on the technical design of the project.

The internship at the Department of Psychology was a short stint of 2 months as it is not allowed to work at two government organizations at the same time. I came to know about this rule after I had worked at the department of psychology and DRDO both for about a month. At that point, I had to choose one of the two organizations to officially work at. I completed the department of Psychology project before leaving and continued working at DRDO for almost a year and a half.

During an amazing learning period at DRDO, I worked on quite a few projects, eight to be exact, but none of them was games that people would play. There was once a visitor in our DRDO lab who showed me some photorealistic visuals his team made in Unreal engine which looked far better than the visuals of AAA game titles I used to play at that time. Coming from a business family I had expressed my interest in management to my mentor at DRDO who supported me wholeheartedly with this and allowed me to look after and guide the projects of other interns. I started guiding and structuring projects for two interns at first and before I could realize it, I was working with 5 teams consisting of 16 people in total. I feel blessed to have gotten this exposure which not many college students get to experience.

After I had moved on from DRDO I still had the urge to make games that people would play and enjoy so I started brainstorming ideas with my friends, I needed something which would be practical for just one person to develop (I was in the third year then and my college startup buddies were preparing for tech interviews), the idea I decided to work on came while discussing ideas with my mom and I started with it.

The very first bottleneck that came with it was that I had a limited idea of how games at the production level were made. For starters, I had very limited experience creating art assets, the need for sound effects was always barebones, and there was no leaderboard or gamer profile integration in any of my projects till then.

Learning on the way, created models, texturing, rigging, animations, mixed music, integrated leaderboards & achievements and that's how I was making something for the mobile platform for the first time... And finally released the game on the Google play store which took me three months to develop. This was a 3D game with a single procedurally generated level. Development of this game introduced me to the verticals of game development and was liked by a few of my friends, but through the journey of making this game, I discovered that I didn't enjoy it as much as I imagined. I imagined it to be just anecdotal and believed that developing this in a team would be far more fun because in a team it is always more fun for me.

The final semester of my college needed an internship for which I joined Lattice Innovations as a VR developer, they needed somebody with experience in VR and game development and wanted to start it as a new skill in their arsenal. I loved the project that I worked on in Lattice which was the development of a low-cost VR-simulated training environment to rehabilitate the elderly from vestibular disorders. Though a lot of fun, it wasn't exactly game development. I worked there for 6 months and in the last 2 months, two more developers joined my project making it more enjoyable for me.

By now I was about to graduate and was still looking for a game development company. One of my friends from DRDO had surveyed AR & VR game development start-ups in India for his research and recommended Threye Interactive as his first choice owing to their innovations and work culture. After interviewing for Threye, I got selected but the founder who interviewed me saw something in me that I had not, and offered me the position of simulation engineer with the option, that after a few months if I still want to move to game development then I tell him. I accepted.

After about six months of working in the Engineering team (not game dev team) of a game development company, I discovered something which now looking back and connecting the dots seems quite obvious.

It took me over 3 years in the chase and 6 months working in the engineering team of primarily a game development company to realize that having a one-track mind had clouded my vision. Solving engineering challenges that utilize my skills to the fullest brings a smile at the end of the day. I got lucky by not getting what I wanted but rather getting far more without realizing it. 

Sometimes life gives us gifts that are more beautiful than what we wanted, it's on us to embrace them.