Early Studies
Growing up I never really knew what career path I wanted to follow. I love animals, but I’m too squeamish at the sight of blood to be a vet. My parents, being Cuban migrants, had low paying blue collar jobs, so following in their footsteps was not really a good option. My mother always said I’d make a good lawyer with how well I debated her, though as good as my arguments were, they were rarely successful in obtaining my desires. Pretty early on I discovered lil indie game called Minecraft, and even though I rarely got more than 12 fps on my Costco laptop, it sparked an intense obsession for video games. But how could I turn that into a career?
It wasn’t until I took an AP Computer Science class in high school that I discovered my love for programming. Having always been someone who thinks logically, coding came somewhat naturally to me. I found immense satisfaction in solving coding problems that seemed incredibly daunting at first. I excelled amongst my peers, and even created a website for my senior exit project, which received a 4/4 grade.
From there, it was obvious that I should combine my two passions of gaming and programming. In college, I continued to excel in computer science courses, aside from some niche classes like bioinformatics and computer vision. I still have resentment towards my advisor for recommending those courses to me, but at least they let me experiment with some areas of Computer Science outside game development.
College Experience
Shortly after graduating, I received an offer at my current job. While Software Development is not the exact same as my dream career of Game Development, I felt this specific position offered a lot of valuable experience. We use the Unity Engine every day to make training simulations. While the projects we work on are for educational purposes, we still sometimes use the terms player and play, because the lines between game and simulations are sometimes blurred when your working in Unity. We have to solve a lot of similar problems to game development, like collisions, raycast, object selection, world interaction, player movement, and level transitions.
I’ve also learned more about Unity and C# in my two years at Tech Wizards, Inc than I did in my 4 years of university. I’ve also become more familiar with programs outside of Unity, such as SharePoint, Excel, git, and project management boards such as YouTrack.
When I’m not playing or making games I like to spend my time trying new things. Most often I’m riding my Onewheel, exploring my surroundings, or grabbing a bite at a new restaurant. I also enjoy going to escape rooms, playing board games, and relaxing on the couch watching a new show. Most recently I’ve gotten into FPV drone flying, which has really put my college robotics knowledge to the test.
Regardless of my current hobby or occupation, it’s undeniable that gaming has always played a major role in my life. Not many people can say Minecraft is responsible for where they are today, but I hope to one day create something as amazing and inspire more people to create games.
My favorite class in college by far was game design. We were teamed up with a student from a game art class to create a game in GameMaker. I took the role as team lead, which was not my preferred role, but a common trend in my group projects. Our first game was an action platformer where the player controlled a germ that was trying to take revenge against its host which killed off its family after taking some cough medication (this was during covid, and the required theme was “pandemic”). The game featured levels taking place in different organs that had special modifiers, such as the lungs which levitated the player every time the host took a breath. At the end, our peers voted for what games were the best, and our game, Viral Rampage, received first or top 3 in all the categories. I remember feeling so much excitement that our game did so well.
I also had the opportunity to work with Night Owl Interactive, a game design cooperative at my university. Night Owl hired 3 students (including myself) to improve gameplay mechanics, fix bugs, and polish their previous game jam winning project, Oro. Having been given the project near completion, the core gameplay and mechanics were already set in stone. Our job was to refine
those mechanics and implement quality of life features. One of the first things I fixed was the graphics, which did not have any Y-sorting implemented, and that caused many issues. I also improved the enemy AI, created a tutorial, added a lot of missing UI, and more!
Oro was the first project I worked on that I was actually paid for, and it also opened the door to some other opportunities with Night Owl Interactive. However, my favorite part about this project was getting to work closely with a professor and another student. It also introduces me to slack and time keeping, which I now use every day in my professional life.
You can learn more about Night Owl Interactive and Oro here https://nightowl.charlotte.edu/
