Whenever I have to introduce myself, I get a little stuck.
On one hand, I have over 40,000 hours of gameplay across an absurd variety of titles β the depth and breadth of my gaming experience are, honestly, what I consider my biggest asset. And it keeps growing every day.
On the other hand, I have a pretty rounded set of game-related skills. I started in art, I’ve written a fair amount of code, and I’d say I’ve got some real instincts for computers. More importantly, I’ve now spent several years actually working in games, shipping a bunch of projects and even leading teams on some of them.
Whenever I tell people I play a lot of games, it sounds cheap. (Even though I’m genuinely proud of it β it’s the biggest fortune of my life.) Because these days even elementary schoolers play games, so what’s special about me, right?
But it’s exactly that pile of gaming experience that made me grow so fast once I joined the games industry.
My first growth spurt happened at Mei Ri Ji Li (ζ―ζ₯η»ε), and I’m still grateful to my direct manager there. When I joined I was honestly a mess β I didn’t even know git. Game data lived in spreadsheets and I didn’t even know what “exporting tables” was. Truly clueless. If I were my own boss, I wouldn’t have hired me. Hahaha. Lucky for me, I had a solid foundation, and using a computer is basically second nature to me. I can pick new things up scary fast. So I quickly turned into a halfway-decent designer.
My second growth spurt I owe entirely to ChatGPT, especially GPT-4. Genuinely the greatest invention of this century!
Two angles:
Unprecedented motivation, plus actual project experience. When the AI wave hit, I started from a single Python snippet calling OpenAI’s API. Step by step, from “an idea in my head” I built out my own WeChat public account, hooked up AI image generation, then a full website with payment and membership. Along the way I had to learn a huge range of computer science: programming languages, multi-core/multi-threaded concurrency, cryptography, Linux, and on and on. From zero I waded through all of it. I genuinely walked through the front door of computer science!!! Without those first compliments from my early users, I honestly can’t imagine I’d have been able to push as far as I did.
The best teacher, period. Thank you, GPT-4. Computer science is a massive, sprawling thing, and a beginner can’t even configure their environment, let alone Google the right question. Most of the time a beginner doesn’t even know what the question is. GPT-4 wrote a ton of code for me, I just kept asking and it kept answering. The $20 a month is the most worthwhile money I’ve ever spent in my life!
Now I want to push further into games. The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know. I really, really want to get into a multinational game studio and learn how their pipelines and tools work. I want to be the best at this. There’s so much value in it! πππ