In college I studied philosophy and neuroscience. Several family members and friends told me that I should consider computer science, but despite spending an unhealthy amount of my time as an adolescent and young adult playing video games I had no desire to code them. Design them? Sure! Deal with the actual creation of them? Not so much.

 It's amazing how just a few short years of working dead end jobs can change one's perspective. After being a landscaper for 4 years and the assistant manager of a tea company for one, it was abundantly clear to me that something drastic needed to happen. I decided to finally look into programming and see if that might at least allow me to utilize my intelligence and creativity while on the job. At first it seemed about as bleak as I had anticipated all those years ago; extremely tedious, annoyingly arbitrary in a variety of details, pedantic beyond even what I experienced learning symbolic logic—no mean feat.

 I can still remember trying to figure out how a simple for loop worked, thinking that whoever had come up with the syntax had to be an absolute imbecile and probably a lunatic. (It now seems so trivial and sensible I don't see how I could have taken issue with it.) After several weeks of dealing with the initial frustration of learning the syntax and a whole slew of basic concepts, I began to see potential. This was something I could do and, if mastered, would prove useful far beyond the mere making of money.

 How could I get a job programming without having any real education in computer science? The solution seemed simple enough: create a video game and use that as my portfolio. I decided to learn the C# language because that was what the Unity game engine used, and that seemed like my best bet in terms of providing the groundwork for me to write my own code and have it turn into something playable. (Unity handles many of the basics such as user input, physics, rendering and so on. There's a reason even AAA game companies very rarely build their own game engines from the ground up; it's a monumental and onerous task.)

 To make a long story very short: I managed, through the power of YouTube, Google, Stack Overflow and a tremendous amount of suffering and toil to create a playable and relatively impressive game within 4 months or so. The game is very much my own, and I have to say I'm rather proud of it. I created every single sprite of pixel art used in it, all of the animations. I made almost every sound effect myself with a microphone and audio editing software. I created all of the music. I wrote the code (with some help from YouTube tutorials, in fairness). I designed all of the units, levels, obstacles, bosses and abilities.

 As a portfolio it served me as well as it possibly could have. I sent it along with my resume to the first programming job I applied for and got an interview. Despite doing rather poorly on the technical interview—it was web development, which I knew nothing of at the time—I still got the job. I was told later that it was the game that got me in more than anything else.

 This is a video of my friend Zach playing through all three levels of the game without dying. (A rare feat, most people die brutally and repeatedly, usually thirty or more times by the end.) You can see every aspect of it on display, as he leaves no stone unturned and grabs all of the coins. The game is far from flawless and I wouldn't try to sell it to anyone, but for a first attempt it's pretty solid. There are some rendering issues and pixels in the background are sometimes askew, there are a few bugs here and there, but overall it plays well and it's fun. (That is, if you don't die too much. I took it to a few local game dev meetups and a few people got so frustrated they had to just get up and leave. Several friends and family members have also been massacred by it.)

 This little game marks the end of an era in my life and the beginning of a new and brighter one. Things have changed quite dramatically since I created this thing in the summer and fall of 2017—in all cases for the better. I'll always remember it fondly, though it was a pain in the ass to create.