On the personal interest level? It kind of snowballed. I was 13 when I finally saved up enough allowance money to purchase copies of Minecraft for my sister and I. I can not understate how sad I was when I couldn't find any emerald items, nukes, or clay soldiers to make civilizations for in my creative inventory. This was where I learnt all of those were mods, and not in the base game. I was too young to understand how to use forge (let alone make my own mods), so I got into adventure maps and minigames using command blocks and redstone. I made friends and we worked on each other's stuff. I panned out to have a knack for the command block side of it while others could utilize building skills to make the levels pretty and well designed. It was a lot of fun. When I started taking programming classes in high school and found out the command block work translated over to me doing well with coding, it was pretty set in stone that game programming was what I wanted to go into. I went to a well-ranked college with it as an available major.

> heard horror stories about what the industry is like now...

There definitely are. You have to remember to value yourself and who you are outside of your work, or else you can be taken advantage of. If the amount of work you're doing is so much that you can't do the other things that make you "you," it's too much work.

I graduated at the same time this never-ending wave of layoffs began, so it has been stressful at many points. Some of my best friends have been a part of those lay offs. Some of us pivoted to a new career because there wasn't a chance to even get started. I made do for some time by going to indie game developer events in the city my family lived near. I built relationships, found in-person community, and landed enough contract work as a Unity programmer to pay my student loans until I could find something long-term.

I now work at a small company where we do a mix of Unity and Web development. Sometimes it's our own products/services, but until those are successful enough we do contract work regularly to build out our runway. I enjoy what I do at work a whole lot, and it's been great getting critique from senior programmers with loads more experience than me. Very thankful about where I am.

In the future, I think I'd be okay with changing over to something else in SWE for my career, so long as it was to help people. I know that I love working with others on games enough that I'd still do it in my free time, just like I did when I was "mapmaking" as a kid.