My Struggle With Game Development
Software engineer wants to make games? It's more likely than you'd think.
Published on Sat Mar 28 2026
I think at some point nearly everyone who plays games and goes into some STEM field gets the desire to make a game. Of course, I’m one of these people. Growing up, I only had an SNES, a Nintendo 64, and later a PlayStation 2. Since we didn’t have a lot of money, I had to live with whatever games my older sister had already convinced my family to buy, and occasionally one or two per Christmas/birthday.
It wasn’t until around 2006 when the DuPont C8 blood tests were happening (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go watch the movie Dark Waters) that I got real money of my own, which meant that I could choose whatever I wanted from the shelves at the store. A whole $400 check to a 7-year-old is a lot of money, even though I was only allowed to spend half of it. My brain at the time couldn’t understand why we had to take the other half of it to open my first bank account! With that $200 I bought a handful of really bad games for our PlayStation (seriously, check out reviews for Motocross Mania 3 if you want to see the kind of games I thought would be good).
Despite some of the bad games I played growing up, I did play some pretty good ones. Super Mario 64 was my favorite as a kid (I fell for every single “How to unlock Luigi” video), with Super Mario World being another favorite on the SNES. I was obsessed with learning everything I could about these games, even today. I still watch videos by people like pannenkoek2012 and RetroGameMechanicsExplained because I love learning how the programmers of these old games cleverly hacked their way into something that feels so good. Naturally, my obsession led to me dreaming about making games. I had so many “levels” drawn out on paper that I swore I’d make in SM64 one day.
After discovering my love for programming, I decided to make my high-school senior project a recreation of the school in Unreal Engine 4, something that I was hoping could lead me into game development just a little more. This really helped fuel my passion, but what comes after has resulted in… not too much. Abandoned project after abandoned project. I think of an idea that would make a cool mechanic, I prototype it, and then I leave it for months and then don’t want to return to it. This persisted my entire college career, and into my software engineering career as well. The most recent project I abandoned was just last year. I at least finally settled on using the Godot Engine since my time using Unreal and Unity were unpleasant because of the sheer amount of bloat that comes with the engine, and just how much memory it needs to run.
So, what’s the problem?
I think that a lot of my problem comes from the lack of inspiration in the projects I’m working on. That has been my biggest struggle on my game development journey. How am I planning on combating this? Stop the cycle of listening to game dev influencers who have never shipped a game before in their life telling you to just make something bad first just to ship it. In my job, I do not write intentionally bad code, nor do I push things to production that I know are bad. I take great pride in the work that I do as a software engineer, and shipping something that isn’t even half-baked that I’m not going to improve on later is not something that I want to do. I plan to do things the right way, even if it means taking a little longer.
Now, you may think that this means that I’m going to be a perfectionist and never release everything. I have a hard time pulling myself out of the perfectionist mindset, but I’ve gotten much better at shipping something good enough, and improving it later. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good enough.
Aside from the coding required to make a game, I’m not a master at 3d modeling, nor am I a musical genius. I’m not even that good at writing. But these things all have something in common - I can practice them just like every other skill I have.
Okay, so what are you doing about it?
To combat all of this, I’m going to work on something I truly care about. No, not my “dream game” (yet). I plan on starting with much smaller games at first to get the hang of some core concepts that I’m not familiar with. Things like different ways of architecting projects, networking (cooperative/multiplayer), moddability, Steam release process, game build/release pipelines, etc. It will all take practice, but it’s something worth doing. Eventually I will make the game I’ve had in my head for the past decade, but to make it right, I’ve got to plan and execute this just right. One step at a time.
For now, game development is still primarily a hobby, but I do intend on making this a more serious venture. I don’t plan to quit my day job to do this, I get far too much satisfaction to just let that go. Just some dedicated time every day to get a little done here and there. That’s the plan anyway.