I want to be a game dev

... once I retire from my full time software job.

It's now widely known that many game devs are paid peanuts, especially if you consider that gaming is technically considered a software industry (even though it gets commonly bucketed into the entertainment industry).

I'm not ready to take a huge nosedive in salary as I have a mortgage to pay, but it has always been a dream of mine to be a game dev, more specifically a director and/or producer.

As with many other folks in the software field, gaming was how I was introduced to coding. Back in grade school when portable handhelds like the Nintendo GBA, DS, and the Sony PSP were everywhere, I was incredibly fascinated by the ROM Hack and (ahem) piracy scene.

I was raised in Korea, where even these globally popular handheld consoles only received limited game releases, because Korea was such a small market for international developers and publishers, and we received almost no official localization, which also meant no legal way to even purchase games.

Within this tiny market was an even tinier community who would develop ROM hacks and patches that would translate major titles to Korean, including translation teams like Hanmaru (한마루).

I've dabbled in these forums to discuss reverse engineering game binaries, building tools to extract text and image data that translators would edit, and also tools that would re-package the modified assets back into the game. I primarily learned to code by decompiling tools other folks wrote, starting with making small modifications on my own, and then eventually being able to write my own Winform apps through VS with C#. This was back when I was in middle school, but I knew at this point that coding was going to be my hobby and my future career.

Today, I'm a software dev in big tech, and I'm still a gamer when I'm home. But I really dream about these two things merging into one. I really like talking about games, but I know how nerdy of a topic this is and I don't really have anyone to share my interests with among my real-life circles.

These days, I've been writing game replay viewers, DPS parsers, MMO addons, Google Sheets scripts, and a whole lot of other random gaming related tools to satisfy my needs. Outside of purely coding, I'm one of those hardcore elitist MMO players who practices DPS rotations for hours, daydream and theorycraft new builds and party compositions when I'm not in front of my computer, and stare at excel sheets and write scripts to generate silly graphs to help min-max every stat that I have. I really like to over-analyze the games that I play and critique every small system that the game offers.

One day, I dream of merging my interests, career, and hobby into one, and eventually become a game dev, or some kind of figure within the gaming industry. I have a very strong voice inside me telling me that this is the path towards unlocking my true identity. And I also believe this transition is very realistic too- Gold River (금강선), the original Lost Ark director, is one of my biggest inspirations, as he started as a game journalist who eventually became the visionary of one of the world's most popular MMOs.

But not yet. I still have a mortgage to pay, and I need to take some ML courses so that I don't fall behind in my real day job.