Coding a game for fun changed my life

How I started programming for a living

Hey, listen!

I haven’t been programming professionally for my entire work life.

Actually, I started kind of late.

In this issue, I’m going to tell you how coding a game in Unity pivoted my career.

It’s 16 °C and rainy. At this point I think the summer will never come this year 🌨️

Hola, mundo!

I joined the college for studying Computer Science after the high school.

I wrote my first line of code there, at the age of 18.

I don’t remember it super clever, but I think it was something like “Hola, Mundo!” (Hello World in Spanish), written in Pascal.

I chose CS because, you know, I loved video games and reinstalling Windows twice a week so, that was the natural choice 😅

But, but…

Turned out that the first year was 90% maths and physics. You barely program during the first year. I wasn’t liking it at all.

I was raised in Prada, a small country village with around 50 houses. I think it’s called hamlet in English — I’ve just discovered the meaning of this word now 😆

When I went to college, I started living on my own in the ‘big’ city. You can imagine how a stupid 18-year-old me might have behaved: I had freedom overflow.

I spent my first college years partying 24/7 and having fun instead of studying.

First career shift

As I was being an awful student, my parents stopped paying me the livin la vida loca in the city — totally normal TBH.

So, I started delivering pizza by motorcycle part-time, for paying the bills.

Poor but happy 😁

I was sharing an apartment with friends that were studying Architecture. I liked the idea of build buildings for a living.

So, what did I do?

I left CS and joined Building Engineering.

And this time, I was enjoying studying those topics.

I managed to study, have the part-time job and partying (a lot) for years.

I made a lot of good friends, had a lot of fun and met my girlfriend — we’re still together to this day.

BUT.

When I was almost finishing my degree, I started losing motivation.

I don’t know really why, honestly. I think it was a mix of things what caused my mental breakdown:

• Huge economic building crysis in Spain.

• My girlfriend and some friends graduated, working for peanuts, and not directly related with what we studied.

• Building in the real world is not as fancy nor as cool as I had imagined. You end up more focused on fitting budgets, deadlines, dealing with incompetent workers and a lot of project managing.

• I didn’t visualize myself doing it for the rest of my life.

So, with just two subjects left to graduate, I quit.

Connect the dots backwards

At that point, I was like a failed person.

A failed student. A failed son. A failed boyfriend.

BUT.

What I didn’t know back then, was that that decision was the best one I had made in my life.

As Steve Jobs stated in the famous Stanford speech:

I was promoted to manager in the pizza restaurant where I was delivering part-time while studying.

Thus, I was making little enough money for a living, while I was waiting for divine inspiration of what to do with my professional life.

One day in December 2015 I was binging YouTube for hours. I don’t know how, I ended up watching videos of indie game developers and Unity tutorials.

I had heard a bit about Unity as an engine for games, but never watched the IDE or how games were made.

It looked pretty cool and fun to me, and started googling for tutorials and checking if it was possible to learn how to make a little Android game.

It turned out that yes, there were plenty of tutorials on the internet for complete beginners.

A spark was lit within me and I started following a tutorial of how to craft a little space shooter 2D.

The tutorial was in C#, which is similar to Java. Therefore, I remembered the fundamentals from the second course in CS and it wasn’t completely new to me.

I started programming every day.

I was so absorbed when I was developing my little game that I lost track of time.

I spent hours and hours on the computer and every little achievement was a dopamine hit that kept me addicted to it.

I was enjoying it so much.

At some point I left the tutorial to start converting the project into my own little product.

I decided to develop a space shooter based on mixing Star Wars with the Spanish politicians of that time.

I wanted to create game that could go viral publishing it in the Google Play Store.

That’s how ‘Spain Wars’ was born.

So I continued making the game art, animating the characters, sounds, programming the scripts… I was having a lot of fun introducing several famous jokes about the politicians.

It looks super cringy today but I felt like Miyamoto back then 🤪

At some point, I had a little demo ready and I published it on the Google Play Store.

They removed it lately due to not updating it to the newer Android versions, but you can still download the apk here if you want.

I uploaded to YouTube a video playing the demo if you want to check how cringe it was 👇

The game didn’t go anywhere.

It barely had downloads and I didn’t continue adding more levels.

Nevertheless, the important thing here is:

Developing this game, ignited my love for programming.

Developing this game, fueled my passion for crafting digital things.

Developing this game, taught me that coding can be fun.

Developing this game, started the journey that led me where I am now.

Again:

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.

Hitting keys for a living

After developing Spain Wars, I was sure about one thing:

I wanted to code for a living.

So I researched about how could be the fastlane to do so.

I joined a 2-year degree in Multiplatform Applications Development (Ciclo Superior de D.A.M if you’re Spanish).

At the end of my degree, I went abroad to Dublin to complete my degree internship through the Erasmus program, and I quit my job at the pizza restaurant.

They were amazing months in Ireland. I have incredible memories and anecdotes from that time.

I didn’t learnt too much about programming, but I drunk a lot of pints 🍻

Spaniards in Dublin. The one on the left, the drunkest.

While I was finishing the internship, I started doing interviews with Spanish companies.

When I was back in A Coruña, I already jumped right away into my first IT position — QA Java developer.

That’s how my journey as a professional software developer began.

That’s how I ended up being an indie iOS developer nowadays, 6 years later.

If you want to know how I switched to iOS development, let me know in the comments. This is getting soo long, and I don’t want to bore you 😜

I hope this serves as inspiration for some of you who have doubt about switching careers.

A small decision may change your life.

See you on next Sunday! 🤘🏼

I made this SwiftUI starter kit to build iOS apps fast 👇