I am two months from hitting that dreaded 30th year. My dreams and aspirations from even just a few years ago have been severely deflated.
I have worked for a total of about 2.5 years so far in my life. I managed this by a combination of welfare bludging and video game addiction. If I spend most of my life inside a game, the world falling apart around me does not seem to matter so much.
I'll spare you most of the sob story, but some details might be useful for context and understanding my limitations and particular proclivity for certain vices.
I was a bright kid from a poor family. We rarely had hot water while I was growing up, and only had electricity for as long as we could siphon it from the government housing main-line.
My father drank and smoked weed from dawn until dusk and has been almost always unemployed, and my mother left shortly after I was born.
When I was around 8 years old, I was visiting a friend and saw his step-father playing a video game in the loungeroom. It was Final Fantasy VII - I had never seen a game like it. I watched him play for a few minutes and then asked if I could borrow it (my playstation happened to not be in the pawn shop that month).
Pretty soon I was completely consumed. It was the ultimate escapism. Sitting there in my piss-stained blanket (I had a bed-wetting problem until around age 12) I played the heck out of this game. After I had sunk hundreds of hours into it, I played it again. And again. And at some point soon after that, Final Fantasy VIII was released.
I begged my father to buy it for me, and to my surprise, he did. ($100 was a lot of money for us). Well, the cycle continued.
At age 10 I took an exam to take the last two years of primary school in an "Opportunity Class". I was accepted and left my friends from my first school behind (probably a good thing for me as one of them ended up in prison for murder and another for dealing drugs).
At 12 I took another exam to get into something called Selective High School. I passed that and started my attendence at an all-boys high school "for the gifted".
In both of these schools The Script was being drummed into my brain. I was told on regular occassion, that if I did not go to University after graduating my life would essentially be over and I had no future.
I skipped school about 50% of the time to play games, or later in my teens, to hang out with girls.
At the age of 14, I discovered the joys of binge drinking. By 15, I had started taking a variety of drugs.
At the age of 16 I was kicked out of my house because my father's new girlfriend was sick of seeing me piss my life away.
By the age of 17 I was moderately addicted to MDMA, and was racking up debt with my dealers, spending about $350 per weekend to satisfy my "need".
I did not end up graduating from high school, being expelled at the beginning of the last year for failing to attend the previous year's exams.
I continued down that path for some time. Combine the party lifestyle and video game addiction and you get a decent picture of my life for the next few years. At least I didn't gamble.
Some time around the age of 21 I decided that perhaps I should get a job. I had just moved back into my father's apartment which was vacant at the time (he and his girlfriend had moved to another city to be closer to her work).
I had been tinkering around and learning programming and other things since around the age of 13. It turns out that somehow I was decent at something which could be leveraged to earn money.
My first job was as a front-end web developer for a slimey small business whose primary clients were other small businesses. I was extremely grateful for the opportunity. As you may imagine, my self-image at this time was garbage - and rightfully so.
I was still hopelessly addicted to video games, playing them almost every waking hour which was not spent at work. I also kept up my other habits, though not quite as spectacularly as when I was in my late teens.
After a year of working as a Junior Front-End Developer, I was "promoted" to DevOps/Support Team Leader for an extra $3k a year. The guy whose job I took was earning $15K more than that, before he quit.
I told them I would take the job but as I wanted to be a Front-End Developer and not work in Support, that if I was not suited for the role I could have my old job back.
It was around this time I decided that I wanted to become a game developer. After 3 months in this new position, I asked to be moved back to my old position. They told me that they would get someone in to fill the Support position soon and in the mean time I could do some Front-End work. I ended up working three jobs for the same salary!
Three months later I found myself leaving that job I going to College for Video Game Programming. I managed to skip two years by communicating with the course coordinator and sending in a working game with it's source code that I made specifically for that purpose.
At college I met a guy, let's call him Blue, who would later become a very close friend. I was attracted to his artistic talent and decided to work with him and another guy for our group assignment. Everything went pretty horribly, as my discipline was horse shit and so was his. The other guy, I eventually kicked out of the group because as much of a F*ck-up as we were, he was worse.
So Blue and I coasted through the course and kept re-starting our major project. It came down to the last day and we still had basically nothing. We managed to put a really bad game together on the last day, write a speech, and do the presentation. We got our Diplomas. (useless)
For the next few years, Blue and I would start, scrap, and re-start projects - never really getting anywhere. I ended up getting a job as Lead Developer for a marketing company and working there for just over a year. During that time I happened to invest into cryptocurency and hit it big.
After about 6 months I had made enough to buy a pretty nice house even in this horrible real estate market. Of course, greed had it's hooks in me. I was paralysed. I had never had so much money in my life and I didn't know what to do with it. What if it keeps going up? I can retire at 27! So I did nothing, and crypto crashed. I "lost" nearly everything.
This part of my life is probably the most frustrating, because it shows a tangible and complete lack of responsibility with regards for the future. It was a period which I can look back on and realise that my locus of control was external, not internal.
"Nobody ever told me what to do with money!" I whined. "Taxes are confusing!", "Being an adult is hard", "Wahh, wahh, wahh". Thinking back on it disgusts me, not because of the massive loss of opportunity, but because of my own inaction.
During the last few years, I travelled overseas a fair few times, bought some nice things, and of course did a shit-load of drugs which helped me from thinking about the hard work required to be an adult.
At one bar, I was so high that I dropped my phone, and wallet with over $1000 on the floor and didn't notice until the morning. And my response? "Oh well, these things happen". I can't tell you today if I was just too ravaged by the MDMA so that I had no serotonin and couldn't feel upset even if I wanted to, or if I was particularly zen that day.
On one of these drug fueled benders I met my current girlfriend. Because I was going hard with the partying at that time I assumed that is what she also wanted to do, so we went even harder together. After about 6 months of this, we had a series of talks in which we decided to cut it all out.
Thank the heavens for that. It's been a year and a half since then, I have been partying only a few times and only for special occassions. I rarely drink unless friends visit from out of town.
Relatively recently (7 months ago?) I decided to give this whole game developer thing a real go. Stop changing ideas, stop restarting projects, get very deep into it. And so far, it's been... Really difficult.
My discipline sucks. I get into routines for a few weeks and then get bumped out very easily. Despite my decision not to restart projects, I have restarted the current project in 4 different programming languages.
Technical stuff, skip paragraph if not interested.
I started in C# using Unity - I moved away because I did not like the Unity Event System. Then moved to Elm for some reason, that was seriously misguided. After realising Elm is a horrible language for what I wanted to do, I moved to JavaScript which is my top language. After some time in JavaScript, I was running the prototype on my laptop and it was destroying my battery. I thought perhaps if I used a language like C, then I could have much less overhead and therefore a smaller footprint and longer battery life.
All that is to say, I have come a ways. It's not hopeless yet. I will have a playable prototype within one, perhaps two months. I have other ideas for things I would like to pursue, though I am wary of splitting my attention too much.
I believe that starting a Developer Log series or livestreams could be a good way to start building an audience. Of course it helps when you can visually show something. Right now, you can see something (simple shapes on the screen, etc) so perhaps some programmers starting out in C and OpenGL would be interested in watching this process.
I have also been uploading some other YT content about scripting, Linux and making a pixel art tool from scratch.
I feel as if I am in the desert. If I look back, I cannot see where I came from. Looking forward, I cannot see an end. I believe MJ uses this analogy in Unscripted .
I hope reading my story was at least somewhat entertaining. There is no happy ending, yet. I will keep you updated.
I have worked for a total of about 2.5 years so far in my life. I managed this by a combination of welfare bludging and video game addiction. If I spend most of my life inside a game, the world falling apart around me does not seem to matter so much.
I'll spare you most of the sob story, but some details might be useful for context and understanding my limitations and particular proclivity for certain vices.
I was a bright kid from a poor family. We rarely had hot water while I was growing up, and only had electricity for as long as we could siphon it from the government housing main-line.
My father drank and smoked weed from dawn until dusk and has been almost always unemployed, and my mother left shortly after I was born.
When I was around 8 years old, I was visiting a friend and saw his step-father playing a video game in the loungeroom. It was Final Fantasy VII - I had never seen a game like it. I watched him play for a few minutes and then asked if I could borrow it (my playstation happened to not be in the pawn shop that month).
Pretty soon I was completely consumed. It was the ultimate escapism. Sitting there in my piss-stained blanket (I had a bed-wetting problem until around age 12) I played the heck out of this game. After I had sunk hundreds of hours into it, I played it again. And again. And at some point soon after that, Final Fantasy VIII was released.
I begged my father to buy it for me, and to my surprise, he did. ($100 was a lot of money for us). Well, the cycle continued.
At age 10 I took an exam to take the last two years of primary school in an "Opportunity Class". I was accepted and left my friends from my first school behind (probably a good thing for me as one of them ended up in prison for murder and another for dealing drugs).
At 12 I took another exam to get into something called Selective High School. I passed that and started my attendence at an all-boys high school "for the gifted".
In both of these schools The Script was being drummed into my brain. I was told on regular occassion, that if I did not go to University after graduating my life would essentially be over and I had no future.
I skipped school about 50% of the time to play games, or later in my teens, to hang out with girls.
At the age of 14, I discovered the joys of binge drinking. By 15, I had started taking a variety of drugs.
At the age of 16 I was kicked out of my house because my father's new girlfriend was sick of seeing me piss my life away.
By the age of 17 I was moderately addicted to MDMA, and was racking up debt with my dealers, spending about $350 per weekend to satisfy my "need".
I did not end up graduating from high school, being expelled at the beginning of the last year for failing to attend the previous year's exams.
I continued down that path for some time. Combine the party lifestyle and video game addiction and you get a decent picture of my life for the next few years. At least I didn't gamble.
Some time around the age of 21 I decided that perhaps I should get a job. I had just moved back into my father's apartment which was vacant at the time (he and his girlfriend had moved to another city to be closer to her work).
I had been tinkering around and learning programming and other things since around the age of 13. It turns out that somehow I was decent at something which could be leveraged to earn money.
My first job was as a front-end web developer for a slimey small business whose primary clients were other small businesses. I was extremely grateful for the opportunity. As you may imagine, my self-image at this time was garbage - and rightfully so.
I was still hopelessly addicted to video games, playing them almost every waking hour which was not spent at work. I also kept up my other habits, though not quite as spectacularly as when I was in my late teens.
After a year of working as a Junior Front-End Developer, I was "promoted" to DevOps/Support Team Leader for an extra $3k a year. The guy whose job I took was earning $15K more than that, before he quit.
I told them I would take the job but as I wanted to be a Front-End Developer and not work in Support, that if I was not suited for the role I could have my old job back.
It was around this time I decided that I wanted to become a game developer. After 3 months in this new position, I asked to be moved back to my old position. They told me that they would get someone in to fill the Support position soon and in the mean time I could do some Front-End work. I ended up working three jobs for the same salary!
Three months later I found myself leaving that job I going to College for Video Game Programming. I managed to skip two years by communicating with the course coordinator and sending in a working game with it's source code that I made specifically for that purpose.
At college I met a guy, let's call him Blue, who would later become a very close friend. I was attracted to his artistic talent and decided to work with him and another guy for our group assignment. Everything went pretty horribly, as my discipline was horse shit and so was his. The other guy, I eventually kicked out of the group because as much of a F*ck-up as we were, he was worse.
So Blue and I coasted through the course and kept re-starting our major project. It came down to the last day and we still had basically nothing. We managed to put a really bad game together on the last day, write a speech, and do the presentation. We got our Diplomas. (useless)
For the next few years, Blue and I would start, scrap, and re-start projects - never really getting anywhere. I ended up getting a job as Lead Developer for a marketing company and working there for just over a year. During that time I happened to invest into cryptocurency and hit it big.
After about 6 months I had made enough to buy a pretty nice house even in this horrible real estate market. Of course, greed had it's hooks in me. I was paralysed. I had never had so much money in my life and I didn't know what to do with it. What if it keeps going up? I can retire at 27! So I did nothing, and crypto crashed. I "lost" nearly everything.
This part of my life is probably the most frustrating, because it shows a tangible and complete lack of responsibility with regards for the future. It was a period which I can look back on and realise that my locus of control was external, not internal.
"Nobody ever told me what to do with money!" I whined. "Taxes are confusing!", "Being an adult is hard", "Wahh, wahh, wahh". Thinking back on it disgusts me, not because of the massive loss of opportunity, but because of my own inaction.
During the last few years, I travelled overseas a fair few times, bought some nice things, and of course did a shit-load of drugs which helped me from thinking about the hard work required to be an adult.
At one bar, I was so high that I dropped my phone, and wallet with over $1000 on the floor and didn't notice until the morning. And my response? "Oh well, these things happen". I can't tell you today if I was just too ravaged by the MDMA so that I had no serotonin and couldn't feel upset even if I wanted to, or if I was particularly zen that day.
On one of these drug fueled benders I met my current girlfriend. Because I was going hard with the partying at that time I assumed that is what she also wanted to do, so we went even harder together. After about 6 months of this, we had a series of talks in which we decided to cut it all out.
Thank the heavens for that. It's been a year and a half since then, I have been partying only a few times and only for special occassions. I rarely drink unless friends visit from out of town.
Relatively recently (7 months ago?) I decided to give this whole game developer thing a real go. Stop changing ideas, stop restarting projects, get very deep into it. And so far, it's been... Really difficult.
My discipline sucks. I get into routines for a few weeks and then get bumped out very easily. Despite my decision not to restart projects, I have restarted the current project in 4 different programming languages.
Technical stuff, skip paragraph if not interested.
I started in C# using Unity - I moved away because I did not like the Unity Event System. Then moved to Elm for some reason, that was seriously misguided. After realising Elm is a horrible language for what I wanted to do, I moved to JavaScript which is my top language. After some time in JavaScript, I was running the prototype on my laptop and it was destroying my battery. I thought perhaps if I used a language like C, then I could have much less overhead and therefore a smaller footprint and longer battery life.
All that is to say, I have come a ways. It's not hopeless yet. I will have a playable prototype within one, perhaps two months. I have other ideas for things I would like to pursue, though I am wary of splitting my attention too much.
I believe that starting a Developer Log series or livestreams could be a good way to start building an audience. Of course it helps when you can visually show something. Right now, you can see something (simple shapes on the screen, etc) so perhaps some programmers starting out in C and OpenGL would be interested in watching this process.
I have also been uploading some other YT content about scripting, Linux and making a pixel art tool from scratch.
I feel as if I am in the desert. If I look back, I cannot see where I came from. Looking forward, I cannot see an end. I believe MJ uses this analogy in Unscripted .
I hope reading my story was at least somewhat entertaining. There is no happy ending, yet. I will keep you updated.
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