A quick recap of how we got here.
It's 2023, I'm now 44 years old and I've worked in retail for over 20 years. I never planned to work in retail, I always thought I'd end up doing something IT related. For the last 4 years I've been studying for a BSc Computer Science degree during my spare time. I've handed in my last bit of coursework, sat the final exam and have officially completed my degree, just waiting for the results to arrive later this year, but everything suggests I should graduate with a 1st class with honours award.
Having attempted university locally after leaving college and dropping out twice, it's nice to have finally completed my degree. The question now I guess is what comes next? I'm comfortable in my current role and get paid well for what I do. With little existing IT experience, changing careers would mean a substantial pay cut. For a while I thought I wanted to secure a role in the games industry, perhaps a producer role where I felt many of my existing managerial skills would transfer over. Failing that I thought about getting in Project Management, but that would likely require some extra formal qualifications.
The last 6 months of my degree required me to complete my final project, for this I chose to make a shoot 'em up game inspired by classic arcade games from the late 70's, 80's and 90's. It was created using the Unity Engine and I absolutely enjoyed the process, from researching many of the great shoot 'em up games of yesteryear to designing, developing and coding the finished project. I realised during this process this is what I enjoy most, making games. Coming up with ideas, thinking about how they'd work and then learning how to put that into code and seeing it all come together.
So that's the plan going forward, I'll continue to work in my current retail role and in my spare time I'm going to continue to develop my knowledge and skills in all things games design, development and programming. With the aim that at some point in the near future I'll of complete a small game and it will be available to buy from the likes of Steam and other online distributors.
Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik.
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