Field Switch

So, why did I decide to switch from game development to backend engineering? Honestly, it was a really hard decision.

Throughout my entire career, I felt that gamedev was extremely unrewarding. In this field, you create complex gameplay mechanics, cope with weird engine architectures, and work extra hours, only to receive a 2-3x lower salary than developers in other programming fields. It had been a really heavy psychological burden for me since I published my first game. So, in the end, I decided to switch to backend.

Because of this transition, I got depressed, and you can see five months of no contributions on my GitHub profile, as well as a broken 800+ day contribution streak and zero posts in my Telegram blog. The realization that I would have to completely retrain and change the direction of my development was unbearable. But eventually, I understood that I actually stopped creating games back in 2022 when I released my first game. Since then, I had been creating complex systems with games as a side product. That means I love to create anything complex and meaningful, from critical backend systems to advanced game engines, and a transition from gamedev was unavoidable (like Richard Fabian, who moved from gamedev to embedded engineering).

After all, without this transition, I wouldn’t have started using Neovim and Linux in general, nor would I have become a better engineer. I also plan to delve into really low-level things (compilers, graphical APIs, even hardware) as a hobby after I find a job in the backend.

I guess that’s it. I just evolved.