My Journey

I was born in '87, part of the first generation of true "TV kids," and my family was ahead of the curve when it came to technology. By the time I could crawl, we already had a gaming system and a personal computer. When I was four, I sat beside my mother swapping floppy disks during backups, convinced I was doing the whole job myself. Computer maintenance fascinated me early. Keeping a machine running never felt like work—it felt like a side‑quest to the main game. Even now, when tech breaks, I'm just as likely to enjoy the challenge as I am to get frustrated.

My dad was a gamer, so I grew up learning about the world through King's Quest, Police Quest, and the Wing Commander series. Stories and games were always intertwined for me. Any chance of avoiding full‑blown computer‑nerd status disappeared once I started school and it became clear I had a fine‑motor and arts disability. The district put me on an IEP and handed me a laptop—an unusual sight in a time when only about fourteen percent of Americans had internet access and libraries were still using the Gaylord Book Charge System. I stood out, and in hindsight, I was always headed toward understanding technology more deeply than most of my peers.

I started gaming before I could spell. My dad and I got fiercely competitive over Evander Holyfield's "Real Deal" Boxing, and I was determined to beat him. With no school to distract me, I dove into the SEGA with a level of dedication I've rarely matched since. A few months later, I finally did it—I beat my father at a video game for the first time. You'd think that would have slowed me down, like I'd reached the top of the mountain. Instead, it lit a fire. I wanted to beat the next game, take down the next boss, hear the next story. That boxing game was also a light RPG—one of the first fighting games to weave in training and progression. Looking back, it was probably my first exposure to the five‑minute loop and why it hooked me so hard. Without realizing it, I was already learning the psychology behind good game design.

Fast forward a decade of ADHD‑fueled gaming repetition, and you'd find a kid glued to early previews of Team Fortress 2—back when it was pitched as a class‑based "Battlefield" before Battlefield even existed—dreaming about making games that looked and felt like reality. Somewhere in that mix, I discovered Yahn Bernier, a programmer who had worked on many of the multiplayer projects I loved. I was reading a lot about self‑made people back then, and something about his path clicked with me. On a whim, I emailed him—and to my shock, he wrote back. He laid out exactly what someone needed to learn to get into the industry. My mom ordered a C++ learning kit, and I was off to the races. Little did I know how many twists and turns life had in store before I'd find my way back to that dream.

I struggled in elementary school. The structure of lower education never fit the way I learned, and by eighth grade I convinced my mother to let me finish my education at home as long as I had materials and some direction. I followed through and graduated from an accredited homeschool program—though I couldn't tell you the name of it now. At the time, I didn't think any college would take a homeschool graduate, so I didn't bother applying. My mother owned a store, and by the time I turned eighteen I already had five years of work experience. Since I wasn't struggling to find a job, I let go of the idea of becoming a programmer. I thought about it from time to time, but it never felt within reach.

At twenty‑one, I followed through on another long‑standing goal and joined the U.S. Army in 2008. I deployed to Iraq from 2009 to 2010 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. I could dress up what my job was, but the truth is simpler: we drove slowly through the night looking for bombs until they found us. That experience left its mark, and I still deal with the effects today.

The next fifteen years of my life were filled with major milestones—marriage, divorce, raising a son, and falling in love again, eventually seeing her daughter as my own. I worked as the assistant manager of a computer repair store in Harker Heights, TX, and later as a team lead for Telenetwork contracted to CenturyLink. I coasted through parts of that period, and it's easy to be hard on myself in hindsight. But it wasn't wasted time. I grew, I learned, and I carried responsibilities that shaped me, even if the progress wasn't as focused or productive as the last two years have proven I'm capable of.

Two years ago, I finally decided it was time to chase the one dream I'd left buried. It started as a hobby—something I wanted to learn so I could say, when my time was up, that I didn't fail because I couldn't. I failed only if I never tried.

I found Harvard's CS50 course for free and worked through most of the lectures and problem sets. Once I had the basics down, I wanted to learn a language that would let me make video games. C++ seemed like the obvious next step since it's central to Unreal Engine, and so many great games are built on it. But my ADHD kicked in hard that first year. I kept bouncing between engines and ideas. I looked at Godot and learned some of its scripting. Then I convinced myself Unity might be the better fit, so I switched gears and learned C#. I even finished Codecademy's introductory course and earned a certification. By the time I wrapped that up, I was thrilled to finally start building my game.

I opened Unity and Visual Studio, ready to go. I even started coding the background systems for the eco‑sim I've been dreaming about for years. But it didn't take long before I hit a wall: I needed a character to walk across the screen, and suddenly it hit me—nothing I'd learned had taught me how to make a character, let alone animate one. So there I was, back at square one. Graphic design.

I had a game. I had just enough coding ability to start building systems. What I didn't have were models, textures, or anything resembling actual game art. I could use placeholder assets, sure—but I couldn't ship a game built on someone else's work. So what was left? Learn. Obviously. I found the famous Blender "donut" tutorial and made the brightest, most suspicious‑looking donut imaginable. But it worked. I could finally create objects that could sit inside my game world. So I made a desk and exported it to Unity. Easy. Done.

Except… why was the model floating two feet above the ground at Z‑0? How do I reset its origin? How do I map its pivot? How do I rig a model? Animate it? Save those animations and call them in code? I could write logic—but how did I make that logic visible? The barrier was massive. The integration problems were endless. And it became clear that if I wanted to take this seriously, I needed more than scattered tutorials and late‑night trial‑and‑error.

It was time for real education. Time for the hobby to become the dream again. I applied for financial aid and enrolled in university.