This post is essentially a 3 in 1, summarizing what happened/what I did in 2024, what could have gone better, and what I hope and will strive for in 2025.

What happened in 2024?

2024 started off with a bang as I got to interview at Rockstar Games for a junior role in Tools Development. I had been previously working for 2+ years in game dev at a casino game company and building projects on the side, in the hopes of eventually landing a AAA opportunity, and this was it. All of that hard work and sacrifice was about to pay off.

However, in the back of my mind, something was not sitting right with me.

At the end of 2023/start of 2024, I started to ponder if game dev was what I would like to dedicate the next years of my life and career to. I absolutely love the creative aspect of it, on the artistic, design and programming levels.

But I also had some gripes with it. Namely with the industry’s direction and future, my personal financial wellbeing, security and ambition, and my personal enjoyment of day to day tasks.

Even though I do enjoy game programming, it can be a very gruesome job, even when everything goes well. The feeling of completing a feature or even a project is unmatched (or so I thought!!!), but the path to get there is more often than not, a very convoluted one.

You might have an idea, implement it, and when it’s complete, realize it does not work for whatever reason, most commonly, a game design one. If you’re lucky, you realize that midway, or even better, at the pen and paper stage when you thought of that new mechanic but soon realized it could not work.

Iterating and moving fast are key in game dev as well as in pretty much everything, to ensure you have the best product possible, but making changes to games can sometimes feel like turning an incredibly slow ship. It can take a while before making a full turn, and when you do and realize the result is not what you wanted, course correcting for that could take even longer.

At the end of the day, these are all a bunch of excuses…

Regardless, I liked and still like to work with games, but had the thought, that there could be something else?

I started dabbling in web development around February, and made the very impulsive decision (as usual) of quitting my job to accelerate my learning and try to bootstrap a small consumer app. This failed of course, for multiple reasons, but I still learned a ton. I went from barely knowing what a web request was to writing a few simple CRUD apps and having them deployed.

I built other small projects and kept broadening my skills.

Eventually I started applying for jobs, and what do you know, to my surprise, I got opportunities to interview at some pretty big companies, for which I never actually thought I’d get a chance after “pivoting” to web for only a few months. I interviewed at both Cloudflare for a position in Lisbon and Amazon for a position in the UK. Unfortunately neither of these panned out, but it already felt amazing and validating to know that the path I took was getting some recognition.

I eventually found a great opportunity which I took, also at a casino game company, working as a backend engineer. I’ve only been there for a month but it definitely feels like somewhere I can apply what I’ve learned the past months and grow as a programmer, while bringing meaningful value to the company. Hopefully I also get the chance to work on some cloud stuff in the future.

In this learning period, I used AI extensively to learn more about web development.

Before the advent of AI, when I wanted to implement something in my game engine circa 2021/2022, I had to make sure the information I was getting was as close to the “truth” as possible. This meant testing specific pieces of knowledge on every scenario I could think of, cross checking information on multiple sources, and just asking around on discord servers.

I am naturally immensely skeptic, and I feel like this helped when navigating teaching myself stuff with AI. Fortunately I also was not a complete programming rookie and could provide myself direction (I believe this can be one of the hardest things to get right when teaching oneself whatever subject).

What could have gone better?

Discipline, as usual. Could have finished more projects, in a smoother fashion. Could have written and documented more of my learning and achievements.

But there was definitely an improvement over past years and that is cool. There was a period this year I performed at a level I was really happy with, but I had more ideas and stuff in the pipeline that just did not materialize. Too many perhaps. Like most side project enjoyers, I tend to have a lot of them going on. I don’t think the amount of projects or their scope is the main issue, it’s that I really have a hard time focusing and keep doing something for a long period of time.

I could also have had a better balance of building projects and practicing leetcode and DSA. Its sucky that in order to get interviews you have to stand out through building things, but interviews always have leetcode stuff. I completely understand why it is the way it is, I just should have balanced it better instead of completely neglecting DSA.

Having used LLMs extensively to learn more about web dev and other things, I also noticed that my own “initial” thought were getting sloppier.

My language in writing/speech felt worse when defining problems, coming up with solutions, etc. I had gone from being somewhat articulate and having to think for myself, to still being articulate but delegating harder thought to AI, to finally just spewing word vomit to AI -> cleaning it up myself -> reprompting to get a decent result (this post was 100% written and proofread by me though 😉).

On the one hand it accelerated me and my learning immensely, on the other I also feel somewhat less capable because of it? I might be overexaggerating and there might be more at play here, but something definitely feels off.

Just need to apply myself more and write more stuff down in physical notebooks, something I do a lot and need to do even more.

What do I want from 2025?

I want to continue learning and improving at backend, while validating previously acquired knowledge, finish more projects and write more.

Just keep the overall direction of 2024 but with more discipline and precision.

When I was still trying to get a AAA game dev job, most of my effort went into building a game engine (very mediocre one at that but learned a lot). For 2025 I would like to try and build something similar, a “large” project that I can use to show off as the new main piece of my portfolio.

I’m currently working on a Gameboy/Gameboy Color emulator & debugger in Go, should hopefully finish it before March. This is already a cool project as is, but I’ve also had an idea to integrate some AI elements into it.

I personally love AI and the possibilities it offers, but also recognize that so much of what’s out there, most of it even, is just noise.

I tried to “force” AI ideas but nothing actually valuable was coming up. The way I plan to integrate it into my emulator is also not valuable in terms of monetary value but rather as an experiment of what’s possible to do with LLMs and vision models, and to provide some light programming entertainment.

I also want to try to learn about other subjects outside my immediate work stuff in a more formal manner (AI/ML, some basic EE). I was enrolled in a EE/CS Masters for this reason, but I could not reconcile uni on top of having a full time job + freelancing + personal projects. Perhaps I could if I cut stuff in the right places and really applied myself. Maybe in the future.

I am happy though with the path I am currently on. Let’s see what I can achieve in 2025.