A reflection on the pursuit of purpose with game development.
A self reflection on my love for games, and how that has shaped my goals to pursue games development.
At 15 years old, I decided that I wanted to make games. Now, at 30 years old, this decision still drives me. After moving countries, completing multiple degrees, and becoming a software engineer, all in the pursuit of this goal.
This post is me checking in: am I still on track, or have the goalposts moved?
The Early Years
My love for games started at a very young age. I was three years old when my parents got me my first game console. It was a Nintendo 64, which they gave me one Christmas. Looking back, this moment is not a first-hand memory, but rather a third-person one of me playing Super Mario 64 on Christmas Day, captured on a VHS tape. This early experience with games definitely had a profound effect on my childhood, as my love for games only grew, and as I got older, I gained access to more and more games and game consoles. Eventually, we got a PlayStation 2, and it was around this time that my mother would take me to VideoEzy, a video rental store in Australia, where I could rent new games for a night or older games for a week. We would often go, and I would bring home a couple of games to try. I would also buy video game magazines that had a CD on the front of it with all the latest demos. I would pop it into my PlayStation 2 and play the demos on repeat. Eventually, this led me to getting my first PC, where I could play the copy of Age of Empires that I got from the Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain box. Among a myriad of other games, I also got to experience my favourite game: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for the first time a couple of years after its initial release.
This was in a time when games weren’t always instantly available. They were something you discovered, borrowed, traded, and experimented with.
I never fixated on a specific genre of game, I just loved experiencing the new worlds, new stories and new possibilities each game offered as they enriched my childlike wonder and imagination. As an adult, I look back at this time and recall how exciting it was to have all these new experiences all the time. While I haven’t let go of these feelings and still engage with gaming today, I’m a lot more deliberate about it and am careful to slot it into my life in a meaningful and healthy manner. Even so, my relationship with games has shaped many of my goals and decisions in life. To the extent that it has shaped a large amount of who I am and the direction I am working towards.
When I was in the 10th grade, we had a careers class. Why anyone expects fifteen-year-olds to think about careers, I don’t really know. As I sat there, pondering what I wanted to do in life, I considered what I found to be most enjoyable to me at the time. I thought about some of my favourite games I had played. A specific logo popped into my head. Electronic Arts. It was at this moment that I found myself on the Electronic Arts website trying to work out if they had a careers section. To my delight, I found it! It was in this moment that I decided what I wanted to do in life. I wanted to make games.
How did I get here?
I was 15 years old when I made this decision. Now I sit here at 30 years old, half of my life later, as a Senior Software Engineer working on Web Applications. This was a calculated pivot that I can trace back to the moment this happened. I’m glad I made this choice, but the dream never really died, and I am still pushing towards my goal of making games for a career.
Why Software Engineering?
I grew up in Perth, Australia. While this city has grown a lot in the last 30 years I have been alive, at its core, it is still just a small mining town. It’s one of the most isolated major cities in the world. This means that opportunity is scarce.
After finishing high school, I did a Bachelor’s Degree in Game Development at SAE Institute (now SAE University College), a creative media institute that focuses on the arts. In my final trimester, we were tasked with reaching out to industry professionals for an internship program. This bit of the curriculum would make sense in a lot of places, but in Perth, there weren’t many options. Luckily, the careers co-ordinator found a (very) small team working on an indie game. I won’t go into detail on what we were building here; maybe I’ll do a retrospective on Bellus Mortem in a future post. This gave me a solid 3 months of work experience on a game development team while studying, and an additional 3 months after graduating, working with the team full-time. This unfortunately didn’t last long as we weren’t earning any money, and conversations with investors and attempts on Kickstarter were unsuccessful. We needed jobs. While I had been dabbling with game development since I was 15 with early versions of Unity 3D, Unreal Development Kit (UDK) and Game Maker, and using these tools more extensively in my degree, my understanding of programming was very rudimentary.
I tried taking the experience I had and trying to find a job doing programming. The feedback I got was that gaming was very different to Software Engineering. I also got this same feedback trying to find work in I.T. I ended up working a warehouse job, picking and packing orders when I decided that if I was going to get anywhere, I needed to understand programming better, and if I could work in Software Engineering, it would be the closest thing to games development available to me until I could work out how to change that.
This started my second Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Majoring in Software Engineering. Two years into this degree, I managed to find my first job as a Software Engineer working for a Consulting company. The company had a sister company that was working on a Software as a Service product and was training up new Software Engineers with a Graduate Program. I learned a lot in this role.
This is where a previously unforeseen benefit of pursuing Software Engineering as a stepping stone started to bear fruit: I had a safety net. Having a background in Software Engineering has given me the ability to find work much easier than if I were strictly a game developer. While my intention was more focused on learning so that I could be a better programmer and game developer, I ended up with a way of leveraging high-paying work to achieve my goals.
Over the next few years, my understanding of programming grew exponentially; however, my production of games came to a screaming halt. I was able to do some minor projects. I did a game jam in 2023 and worked on a mobile game in Unity soon after that, which is documented on my YouTube channel. While the desire was still very much alive, my environment was making it very difficult to build meaningful momentum. This led me to move to Tokyo, Japan, in 2024.
The goal here was simple: Learn the language, find a job (Software or Games), and just work towards making games. Simple, right? Well, I did learn a lot of Japanese, the idea for this website was born at this time, and I was pretty close to finding a Software job, but ultimately, it didn’t feel like the right direction for me, so I returned to Australia in 2025.
After finding my feet again in Australia, I think I have established a much healthier relationship between work, playing games, and making them. I’m currently working on a game of Snake in C++, which is actually acting as an introduction to Game Engine Development. I will be talking about this a lot in future posts. I also have an extensive backlog of game ideas that I am working towards, some with the custom engine and some in Unreal Engine. While progress feels slow, I feel like I am making meaningful progress towards my goals, am learning a lot about games at a low level, and am having a lot of fun doing it.
Why Game Development?
This is a bit more of an introspective question. One that I have asked myself a lot over the years. Thankfully, my reasoning has been pretty consistent, so it hasn’t been difficult to continue pursuing my goals. I’ll break these reasons down into simple numbered paragraphs:
I want to make games to provide people with the same sense of joy I felt playing them growing up, and to some extent, still feel today
Games are the perfect amalgamation of different media that I enjoy. I love programming, music, digital art and architecture.
Video games are a challenging thing to create. I love that they continue to push me out of my comfort zone and teach me to do hard things. The pursuit of technical excellence is eternal.
I want to be a part of a community of like-minded people who all have a shared interest in game development and gaming.
I want to be able to have a space to create and put my voice out into the world. A way to share ideas, thoughts and feelings that relate to my experiences.
These five reasons highlight what I love about game development and why it’s important for me to pursue it. The last two points also capture the reasons why I’m writing this very post!
These are the reasons I consistently come to when I think about this; however, there is one more reason that I don’t talk about often, because it feels smaller and more personal.
When I was in that careers class, staring at the Electronic Arts home page, my screen went black. The teacher had turned my computer off because he thought I was playing games instead of working. When I explained I was looking at the careers page, he apologised and turned it back on, but there was a look on his face—a silent disbelief.
Looking back, I don’t think he meant it how I took it. I think he didn’t believe that I wasn’t playing games. But this moment stuck with me over the years.
Part of my drive to pursue game development comes from wanting to prove to myself that I wasn’t wrong to believe I could accomplish something like that. Not to spite anyone, but to know that I can commit to doing something difficult and that I don’t abandon it just because someone else couldn’t see it yet.
Where I am now and the road ahead
This has led me to where I am now. At the end of 2025, I’m living in Perth, Australia, working as a Senior Software Engineer, and working on very small game projects in my free time when I want to. Depending on how you look at it, I have been successful. However, I believe I still have the drive and potential to accomplish more, and I want to push myself to do so. I believe that starts with my environment, not just where I live, but the conditions around me. The opportunities, the people, the cultural attitude towards risk, and the friction or support I experience when trying to move forward. I moved to Tokyo, trying to find a space where I could feel more aligned so that I could pursue my goals in a place where they were more achievable. While it didn’t work out how I had hoped, I still believe my instincts were correct; I just need a different approach.
With my goal being simply to make video games, you may or may not have thought by now that we are in the age of the internet, I can make games anywhere and with remote working options, why is location important? While I agree with you that I can make games anywhere, being able to make games anywhere doesn’t mean every place offers the same conditions for doing so. Some environments place limits on possibilities. Others expand it. My environment is inherently isolating; this has pros and cons, but one of the main cons is that opportunities don’t come by very often. The decision to move to Tokyo was driven by the sense of opportunity. Returning to Australia has shown me just how much of a difference that made.
Having a comfortable environment is important for us as humans, but knowing when to step out of that environment and chase discomfort is how you grow and expand your horizons. This is where the FEAR//LESS brand came from. Aside from it being a play on words with fearless and fear less. It signifies that stepping out from comfort and learning to “fear less” allows for meaningful growth in the pursuit of your goals and learning to embrace the journey.
Conclusion
So, as I wrap up this reflection, I want to highlight that the joy I got from gaming up until that pivotal moment at 15 years old paved the road for the next 15 years to today. Moving forward, I continue to pave the same road, and I’m excited to see where this journey will take me next. My love for games has shaped me into the person I am today and has taken me around the world. I’ll continue pushing to make my dream a reality; that is my purpose.
I’d love to hear your experience! Feel free to leave a comment below or send me an email: mail@fearlessgamedev.com
