Working on 3D games has always been my goal.
At the beginning, my dream was to join an indie game team. To move toward that, I once took part in a GameJam and teamed up with four classmates to form a temporary dev team. Our goal was to make a rough game demo within 24 hours.
Although the atmosphere at first was great, things unfortunately didn’t go very smoothly. The biggest problem was that we overestimated how much work we could finish in 24 hours. We gave our game a huge worldbuilding setup and an overly long timeline, so in the end the game we made could barely express what we originally had in mind.
Photos from Game Playtests
After that experience, I realized just how much work it takes to make a game. It was far beyond what I had imagined at first. I could of course consider switching to 2D or text-based games, but it’s obvious those directions don’t really match the skills I’ve been developing over the years.
After that, I wanted to dig deeper into the actual pipeline of making a 3D game. During the GameJam, I was only in charge of art, and didn’t really get to understand the production side, especially programming. So a few months ago, I tried teaching myself UE5.
This round of learning focused on the art-related parts of game development: modeling, making textures, unwrapping UVs, rigging characters, creating collision bodies, making environment animations, and so on.
Screen recording of the game I made
The learning process was really fun, and I ended up with a pretty good final result. But it also helped me understand even more clearly how hard it is to make a 3D game all on your own. Because of that, I probably won’t consider becoming a independent game developer. Even if I form my own team one day, my first concern will be whether the game can actually be finished. Overly complex worldbuilding and overly long game’s playthrough are things I’ll definitely try to avoid.
All in all, after graduation I still plan to prioritize joining a big game company and becoming a “small screw” in a giant machine. A lot of people have told me that working on this kind of production line is boring, because individual creativity isn’t valued that much. But to me, there are plenty of people with good ideas, and the bigger a project gets, the harder it is to take every single person’s ideas into account. That kind of trade-off feels reasonable to me.
That’s roughly how my career goals have shifted over time.