Quitting Mechanical Engineering for Game Development | ft. Siddharth Varde
1“How did your parents react to you switching to game development?”
”They had no reaction….because they never knew”
One fine day Siddharth went in search of a gaming café where he could play the Last of Us, and returned determined to quit his B. Tech degree and switch to game development. This is the story of Siddharth Varde in #HumansOfGaming
When he was quite young, Siddharth remembers having a Gameboy knockoff in which he would spend hours playing simple games like Tetris. However, the game that did it for him was X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He remembers going to gaming cafes after school for 2-3 hours every day trying to figure out a way to beat the game.
As school ended, Siddharth faced the daunting task of choosing a lifelong career. However, Siddharth didn’t have to think much. His uncle was a mechanical engineer. His cousin was a mechanical engineer. The path was set for him, all he had to do was walk.
And walk he did, only to reach a dead end.
”After two years into Mechanical engineering, I realized it was not for me. I couldn’t focus on studies, I had no interest in the subject, I hated it.”
So one day, to blow off some steam Siddharth ventured out to a nearby gaming café. All he wanted to do was to play The Last of Us for a few hours, but the gaming gods had other plans for him.
At the same gaming café, Siddharth noticed a Unity logo on a poster. He knew about Unity and had even tried his luck with the software. Intrigued, he asked the owner about it. The owner told him how he knew unity and could teach it to him if he liked. Siddharth was more than happy with this proposal, the only problem, he had no coding experience. So first he was taught Java, then C#, and finally Unity.
Meticulously balancing his engineering workload with learning game development, Siddharth soon created some games of his own.
These projects were key when he had to tell his family that he wanted to quit engineering and wants to study BCA in Game Development.
Seeing his passion for gaming, his family was soon on board.
For the next three years, Siddharth devoted himself entirely to game development, honing his skills well enough to secure an internship as a Unity Game Developer.
However, there was a huge problem.
“The team I was a part of wasn’t very supportive. There were no code reviews, nothing. But I wanted to grow, I wanted to write better code. The code I was writing was not scalable at all. I was good with C++ and OOPS but had very little understanding of DSA and design patterns. I knew I needed to learn more. I needed mentorship”
This is when Siddharth discovered Outscal and enrolled in our Full Stack Game Development program.
Currently, Siddharth is working as a Game Developer at Appsoleut Games. A game development studio where he found the supportive team he was in search of, in an industry he was destined to be.