Today marks the end of my second attendance to GDC. This year's conference was smaller compared to the last year's. I could clearly see the impacts of the current economic downturn. The best thing one can do is to not worry about this, keep working on their craft, and be the one who's still standing when things get better.

On the other hand, personally, I felt much better compared to my experience last year. This is because I have gotten much better over the course of the year. Last year, I remember feeling super inadequate, and had this feeling where I wasn't sure if I could become a skilled game developer. And those feelings had some merit. At that point, the only thing I had done was super simple projects in Unreal and one kinda interesting small project in Unity.

It was a terrible feeling, and deep down I knew I was far from where I wanted to be. However, I'm grateful for that feeling, which pushed me to do more. After the conference last year, I applied for game dev related internships everywhere, and I couldn't secure one. So I decided to make my own game and put it on Steam.

Putting the game on Steam as opposed to other platforms like itch.io was important to me. Firstly because Steam is the platform gamers default to, but also because it requires significant more effort than putting it on itch or other similar platforms. It is a platform to distribute games, not a platform to display personal projects.

At that point, I had just finished the Operating Systems class at school so I was feeling a little more confident in my C/C++ skills. Over the summer, I treated making the game as a full time job. I've learned a ton about lots of different aspects of game development. However, the whole process was slow. By the time the summer had come to an end, the game was far from finished and now I'd have to continue development while attending school.

In the fall semester, I took Computer Graphics (taught by Ken Perlin) and Algorithmic Problem Solving (taught by Joanna Klukowska). I'm very happy with both of my choices. In the computer graphics class, I learned about (and implemented) a lot of stuff that you take for granted when you use an engine like Unreal or Godot. It was a lot of fun. And I gained a lot of confidence in solving competitive programming style questions in the Algorithmic Problem Solving class, which had been one of my biggest insecurities about my programming skills.

Meanwhile, the progress in the game was slow. I countinued working on it whenever I found time from school work, but it wasn't enough to realize my vision for the game. Initially I was planning to release just after summer, but I kept delaying and delaying so that I could at least add couple more features and it'd at least feel a bit more "complete". Towards the end of the semester, I realized if I kept delaying further, this would just become one of those projects that never sees the light of day. I have to put what I have out there, even if it's far far far from perfect.

I let go of many features I wanted to add and quickly added necessary stuff for the release. I put the game on Steam on January. Since it was far from what I'd expect from a "complete" game as a player, I put it out for free. So far it has 6 reviews on Steam, 5 positive, 1 negative. I haven't asked anyone to leave a review, so I believe they're all organic. I'm proud of this.

So coming to this years GDC, I had created and released a game all by myself, was feeling much more comfortable with low level graphics programming as well as solving algorithmic problems. So I was feeling much better. And the only reason I was feeling better was that I had put in the work, and actually gotten better as a developer.

Now, all things considered, I'm still a beginner. I have so much to learn and go through. But in this past year I kinda proved myself that I can do it if I give it the time it takes and put enough effort. And it paid off. I'm grateful for all the terrible feelings I had at last year's GDC.