Creating good looking games that are light on the system | ft. Rohith Kannan #jobs #gamedev
2In an Indian household, being born as the younger sibling comes with a lifetime subscription of eagerly waiting for your elder siblings to stop hogging the computer. And Rohith Kannan’s story was exactly the same.
The game at play here is Midtown Madness. The 1999 racing game for which a young Rohith spent hours waiting, and the game which ignited Rohith’s love for gaming.
But, falling in love is always the easy part.
“I came from a family of doctors, my father was a doctor, and my sister was a doctor so there was a lot of pressure”
The Bollywood cliché of an Indian kid having only two choices - Engineering or Medical does not hold true for edge cases like Rohith. He even had to rebel to choose software engineering.
But Rohith’s rebellion paid off, and soon he even secured an internship at MaxLinear as a backend Software Engineer. An experience that made Rohith realize even though he loved coding, this was not for him.
”Doing backend, I wasn’t able to see what my code was doing, there wasn’t a direct visual feedback”
Looking to reap the fruits of his code Rohith thought of doing something on the front end. When one day knee deep in his research Rohith came across Unity, and voila, suddenly all the dots connected in his head. Rohith taught himself Unity using YouTube videos and different programming forums, and slowly but surely he got the hang of it.
With his newly acquired skills, Rohith secured a job as a Unity developer. However, while he was able to create amazing simulations in Unity, he knew there was something off.
“What I created was working, but not easy on the device. It was not optimized, and I wanted to learn that”
This is when Rohith came across a post by one of the Outscal students about how he is currently dwelling on the complex yet beautiful world of design patterns. And there it was, another moment of clarity for Rohit. Now he knew what he needed to do next to upskill himself and to make his code more efficient and easier on the system.
Rohith went to his dad and showed him the exact LinkedIn post, and told him that is what he needed to learn. In December 2022 Rohith enrolled in Outscal’s Full Stack Game Development program. By July 2023, Rohith was working as Game Developer at TomoClub, creating games that are not only visually appealing but also well-optimized.