Nothing here shipped. That was never the point.
Between February 2020 and December 2022 I taught myself Unity properly — deliberately going deep on the engine rather than trying to finish and release things. Every professional role I’ve had since draws on this period.
What got built
- A 3D game mixing Bomberman and Doom. Grid-based destruction with first-person movement. As strange as it sounds.
- A 3D JoJo-inspired fighter. Mostly an experiment in animation and combat feel.
- Multiple 2D fighter prototypes. Repeatedly rebuilding the same genre, each time knowing more about why the last attempt felt wrong.
What it actually taught me
2D and 3D pipelines. Finite state machines. Tilemaps. Animation systems. Gameplay architecture and state management. Iterative prototyping, and working with other people on something with no deadline and no external pressure to finish.
Choosing one engine and staying in it for three years, rather than engine-hopping, is the reason I could step into a lead programmer role later and mentor other people through the same material.
Before this
Further back — around 2017 — the first code I wrote was for Minecraft mods, which turned into a Discord bot called Syntax Bot. You could query a programming language’s syntax and it would return the relevant information. Java, HTML, and JavaScript, plus a first encounter with event-driven logic, command handling, and debugging.