Thank you for the encouragement, Nina…the story is a little longer.
I started learning programming (and taking it seriously as a career choice) a couple of years ago. I bought an Udemy class for Android Studio and Java. I got about half-way through it,made a few apps, had some fun.
Then I got a couple Unity C# tutorials (‘the fox game’, a clicker game) and somewhere along there I stumbled into the C# with Mosh Hamedani series and also the GameDev series.
Mosh’s C# classes are great, but it was difficult for me to apply the concepts with such a limited understanding. I mean, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve looked at JavaScript, JSX, and Python3 with little to no difficulty, but two years ago was a different story and Mosh’s classes were too hard for me.
The GameDev series is great! I really like Rick, Ben, and Sam’s teaching styles. I’ve bought most of the GameDev stuff (most everything except the Unreal classes), and I really like the things that I learn in ‘How to get a job in the games industry’ classes and such.
I still have a lot of good ideas for games that I would like to make, and when time allows, I definitely want to get back into game development, either as a hobby or as a career.
I got hit with a bunch of problems around the same time that caused catastrophic data losses, reloading my computer several times, hard drive failures, something happened in my Steam account got messed up and my controlled got messed up again so I haven’t been able to play anything like Dead Cells for the past month or so. I just got my controller fixed yesterday after ANOTHER OS reload. I dorked my computer again trying to do something in Python3, but that’s another story…
It was just problem after problem for everything I was trying to get done with a video game or Unity or save files. Seriously, that was some Bad Moon stuff.
Where was I? Oh yeah, so the programming…I currently work as an electrician in a frozen pizza plant, which I am not ungrateful for, but I don’t like the work environment. The people are rude, I’m sick of constantly finding and fixing gross OSHA violations that other people ‘engineered’ into whatever the h— it was they were thinking to try to do…and many of the leads in this plant are extremely rude.
I’m sick of this line of work, so I made a commitment to myself to start learning to be a programmer, and THAT journey has been great! I’m really proud of myself for what I’ve been able to learn, even though I haven’t met all of my objects yet.
I live in a town < 50,000 people in Kansas, and we don’t have any real ‘programming’ jobs here. Everything here is industrial automation, so it’s all Allen Bradley PLC and ladder logic. I just don’t care for that stuff because I don’t want to mess with external hardware. I don’t want to mess with robotics because I’d rather animate a game object instead of needing a physical object to manipulate.
So this React Developer job is new here in town. There’s nothing like it. So I bought a couple of Udemy classes and started them over the weekend, and on Tuesday or so, I walked into the office and basically said something like, “I know I’m not the guy you want to hire now, but if you give me just five minutes, I’d like to tell you how I can be the guy you’ll want to hire by the end of summer…”
So that meeting went well. We’ve exchanged a few emails and I’ve been studying hard. He has some side projects to help me get started, and the in-person mentoring will help a lot!
The best part is that after I change careers and get settled into my programming career,I can get back into GameDev as a hobby and there will be no conflict of interest between my indie games and my application development employment.
That’s the kind of ‘perfect world’ I’m working towards this summer, and I don’t think I would have put the puzzle pieces together in this way if it haden’t been for many of the things I’ve learned in GameDev and especially Rick’s ‘Get a job in the games industry’ course…There’s a lot of powerful information in there!
