I am 30

I turned 30 this week.

Hopefully.

I write these in advance, so I'm actually still 29 while these words travel to my fingers to smash them into the keyboard. That's not because I don't want to write them in the same week, but if there is nothing lined up and I'm deep in making games, I don't want to have to take time out of making to write about making.

But this week I'm not going to directly talk about the games, and instead reflect on the journey that got me here.

A few weeks after I turned 10, through a combination of saving up pocket money and asking to get some money for my birthday instead of a present, I bought a Gamecube. My parents had a Mega Drive, and they'd got me a Game Boy and a PS1, but this was the first time I bought a console myself. In the run up to the Gamecube's release, me and some friends designed our own console called the DMJ, initialed after our first names.

With a console comes games, so we came up with concepts for those. There was a racing game, and a game with elemental monsters. This was the time I decided I didn't want to just draw all these things on paper, I wanted to actually make them. From this point, whenever people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them I wanted to be a game designer.

My first step to doing so was using Powerpoint to make games which consisted of images that had hyperlinks attached to them, opening a slide that was slightly different to give the illusion of the game reacting to the choice.

Meanwhile, at school, I was one of a handful of overachieving pupils who got to have special English lessons with the headteacher. Those special lessons stopped for me as soon as I used "should of" instead of "should have", because what kind of 10 year old is dumb enough to make a stupid mistake like that? But no matter; it's not like having that rug pulled out from under me was ever going to have a lasting effect that caused an overshadowing sense of doubt for the next 2 decades, right?

And splitting someone up from their friends in the final year of primary school because of an altercation that happened the year before is definitely not going to have any lasting impact of trust issues, or force them into not bothering to make connections with anyone because they'll only get taken away.

Just before turning 13, I discovered Game Maker and got to grips with it's drag and drop system. Over the next couple of years I transitioned into using code instead thanks to the Game Maker Language.

When it came time to choosing options for GCSEs, I made choices that I thought would help me in a career of making games. Art and Graphic Design both seemed like obvious choices, and Business Studies would come in handy if I ever wanted to run my own company. And then I picked German because they advised everyone to pick a foreign language and, as a 14 year old, I assumed it would help translate my games into German. 16 years later, if the game says "My favourite football team is the flea market" then I'm your guy. If not, I'm out.

A couple of years later, it was A-Level choice time. Maths and Computing were both non-negotiable, so when my school that doubled as a sixth-form told me that they were not offering Computing because not enough people wanted to do it, so they weren't going to replace the retiring teacher, they advised me to go elsewhere. And then they proceeded to proudly boast the Maths & Computing College logo everywhere they could, even though they were now actually just a Maths College. They didn't see me boasting that I had at least 6 friends, even though I was no longer in contact with any of them after they'd all decided that I had abandoned them because I was forced to go somewhere else.

The college I ended up going to were quite happy with my choices of Maths, Computing and Physics. For my final choice I picked Spanish, mostly for the same reasoning that I chose German at GCSE in the hopes I could translate things myself. The college then told me that nobody has ever wanted to do both Computing and Spanish before, so they always schedule the lessons at the same time and I now had to pick which one to replace. Since Computing was not going off the table, I traded Spanish for Business Studies.

During the first Physics lesson, the teacher was writing all sorts of nonsense on the board, and the rest of the class seemed to understand whatever the hell the weird symbols were. Then she started asking people questions, and I'm incredibly fortunate that the one she asked me was "It's a bit hot in here, could you open a window?" because that's the only thing I understood.

Going from my Chemistry class a couple of years earlier complaining because I was too smart to be in their class to now being the dumbest person in the room made me think that maybe I "should have" picked something else. So I swapped Physics for Goverment & Politics, because if games didn't work then I could become Prime Minister.

The obvious choice for university was studying Computer Science, and a few places had modules which focused on making a game. A friend mentioned he wanted to go to Salford to study Physiotherapy, and he'd seen a course in the prospectus called Computer & Video Games. I still picked Newcastle as my first choice, but when I worked out I needed 100% in my Computing exam to get the grade I needed to get in, I was headed for Salford. Except my friend had decided he didn't want to go, so I was now going alone.

I thought about dropping out several times. The course was way more dependent on group tasks than any of us were led to believe, which meant the final grade relied on having a good group. While part of the grade was based on the individual effort put in, being in a bad group meant you had no chance of a good grade. At the start of the second year, I was part of two of the worst groups. James, if you are reading this, don't bother giving me those sound effects - you are 10 years too late.

I decided the best course of action before dropping out was to lodge a complaint, so I scoured the university's website and could not find any information about how to do it on the main site or the student portal. There was an article on the student portal which stated that all media students had been told about an opportunity to attend an event at the BBC, although I was a media student and this was the first I'd heard of this. The article mentioned how to apply and, since I was a media student, I applied.

A lot of students from different universities attended the event, and I discovered it was heavily focused on sport, which I was not interested in at all. At the end of the day, they said they wanted volunteers to help run another event in the near future, but to apply you needed to write about your 'Sporting Hero' and only the best would be selected. Since I had no interest in sport, obviously I applied and ended up getting selected.

If you want to read what I wrote, it's in this post.

I admited to one of the other volunteers, while we were backstage at the first ever full out-of-studio broadcast of Football Focus at the Salford Old Boys Club, that I felt guilty for taking up a spot that a sports or journalism student could have had. He told me not to feel guilty, and that I was picked because I had proven myself to be better than them. It's kind of funny that the boy who was kicked out of English lessons for not using words properly had proven himself to be better than people who wanted to write words for a living.

Thousands of pounds of debt that I am never going to pay off and a degree later, I got my first games industry job as a QA Tester at TT Games. After just over a year of testing, and being possibly the fastest person in the world at 100%ing LEGO Marvel Super Heroes Universe in Peril, I became a Junior Game Scripter, placing dinosaurs in LEGO Jurassic World.

After a couple of games, I got promoted and things got rough. Having 6 months to implement all the content in a Hub world, iterate over feedback, fix bugs and polish is a bit of stretch. So imagine doing that, while also doing the same for half of the story levels, helping train someone new to work on the other half of the story and helping people in other departments adjust from working on the handheld tech to the console engine, on top of the usual helping other departments that I did anyway. And somehow, miraculously, getting it all done without quitting like I desperately wanted to.

And, hey, if I'd done all that in 6 months, surely when I joined another project mid-development, they'll have... oh, they hadn't got a single level close to finished. And all the cool stuff that design had just pitched in the welcome to the project meeting that would make the game feel fresh, after years of complaints that the games are too similar, had just been scrapped? It was a disaster that I had to stick around to see how it played out. Turbulent is the best way to describe it.

Towards the end of the project, production complained that no scripters had signed up to come in at the weekend, which was primarily because the majority of them weren't even in during the week because they were ill. To satisfy them, I begrudingly said I'd come in on the Saturday, but when I did the network was down and IT weren't going to be able to sort it for at least a couple of hours. I stormed out and decided I was never going to do a weekend again.

Almost a year later, another project was wrapping up and I hadn't been in on a weekend since that Saturday. I'd been collating numbers which showed that the script team had a higher workload per person than any other department and, across every project I'd been on, I was in the top 5 workloads (the construction design team always had the second highest workload per person, with code and audio usually not far behind). While the validity of the numbers could be debated, it correlated with other data (like ownership of levels), and the names of the people that appeared in the top 5 were definitely accurate, which made it even more devastating to discover I was #2 on my first two projects where I was junior level.

I decided if I could make it to the end of this project, I'd be able to argue that if one of the top developers could manage to finish a project without working a weekend, then nobody else should have to. And maybe on the next project I could have done no overtime at all, because some days I was getting in at 7.30am and going home over 12 hours later.

Technically I did manage to do no overtime on the next project, because I left. The studio had promised to always allow more than a year to work on a project, especially after development time was getting progressively shorter. And then it immediately went back on that promise and demanded the next project be done in 6 months, and use tech that almost nobody on the team had used before.

I questioned whether I jumped to another game studio, as was seriously considering Rockstar after a friend I knew there kept telling me he'd help get me in, but I knew there would be friction a few months down the line when the new guy refused to work more than 40 hours a week. So I became a Software Developer instead.

If you fancy having a break from reading at this point, go ahead. Things are going to get a bit heavy from here.

June 2021. I'd had visits from depression and his friend anxiety for years, especially during those 6 months doing pretty much everything at TT, but always kept it to myself and tried to power through. But I couldn't anymore. Something was different this time.

I'd never seen a doctor about it before because I was worried that medication would stop my brain from being creative, and that's the one good thing I had. Then I watched an interview with someone who thought the same thing, but they started medication and discovered that it didn't stop that part of the brain. So I decided to see a doctor and left without any medication because they'd decided if I've managed to get better by myself before, I'd probably magically get better again.

They referred me to an online NHS service to do Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, but it provided information that I already knew, wasn't offering any solutions I hadn't already tried, continously made me do the same questionnaire which seemed more concerned about if I had a job than my mental health, and, if anything, this lack of help was making things worse. Before I was given login details, I had to do phone calls with two different people that told me they will monitor my progress on reading throught the articles, but they would not actually do anything unless I'd indicated I was suicidal.

While I repeatedly told the man from the first phone call that I did not have any plans to jump over the fence onto the train tracks, partly because I no longer lived in a place where that was possible, I later discovered that suicidal ideation is a thing, and wanting to not exist without planning on how to seize to exist is technically a suicidal thought. But I didn't find that out through the website, and maybe if it stopped repeatedly asking about my job and actually mentioned I was in a much worse place than I realised, somebody could have stepped in. 

I tried to figure out what triggered me. For the past few visits, I'd been able to predict when they were going to happen because it coincided with a part of the job that occured every few months that was incredibly tedious and made my mind look at everything more negatively than normal. But this happened outside of that cycle.

Could it have been the heat, because it was stupidly hot in the office and there was no air conditioning? Was it that the new person was continously interrupting my day so that it felt like I was getting nothing done, on top of struggling to find answers to their questions and feeling useless? Was it that I still hadn't got over an incident earlier in the year where I was the victim of criminal damage, breaking-and-entering and theft and, despite my entire life being told they are there to help, the police refused to get involved?

I returned to work, and they decided to put everyone on private healthcare in an effort to get me access to some help. A couple of months later, the login details came through and the website said to phone a 24/7 number with the policy number, and after having another rough day I plucked up enough willpower to do phone up. I was already on the verge of tears while listening to the hold music, and then I finally got through to speak to someone. The woman asked for the policy number and then, completely unapologetically, told me that the policy does not cover this number and that she was going to have to hang up. I spent the next few hours crying, alone and in the dark.

Things usually got better after a couple of weeks, but it had been months. The doctor made an assumption that I'd get better myself, but the very part of me having gone to them to ask for help should have been a sign that I wasn't. And given that this year I'd already learned that the police would refuse to help when I needed them to, and the doctor had already said I'd be OK, I didn't want to go back to the doctor because they'd probably just tell me I wasn't trying hard enough. And when you are already at your lowest point, desparately trying to scramble your mind into a state where you feel like you can actually ask for help, being told to try harder is one of the worst things to happen.

As another attempt at getting me help, work made me go to counselling for a couple of months. It seemed to improve my mood a little, but I was still not OK. Before going to counselling, I'd attempted some self-therapy and asked "When was the last time you were happy?" and genuinely couldn't think of an answer.

When I first left the games industry, I didn't think about my time in it much, thinking that by ignoring it completely I could forget about the reasons that forced me to get out. But then I noticed that I had been thinking about it a lot more, especially since this latest, much longer, visit from the mind monster started. And then I started comparing it to my current job.

How come I was frustrated with interruptions from other people to help them out, but I wasn't when I made games? Why was I taking it personally when a customer complained about part of the system that I didn't write, but I was fine when people on YouTube said a level I worked on was not good?

Something about making games changes how my mind interprets everything.

I looked for some jobs, but nothing was appealing to me. I'd told recruiters on LinkedIn that I was looking but they continued to be as incompetent as ever, to the point where I deleted LinkedIn to not catch whatever stupid they have by digital osmosis. Not that I was looking for jobs on Facebook, or even using it at all anymore, but I decided to delete that too.

Then I thought that since I had enough savings to do it, maybe I should try making a game on my own. I wrote my resignation and immediately felt better.

Just before my last counselling session, much like Guz Khan in the Taskmaster lab, I had a revelation. Even though I was no longer on LinkedIn, I saw that someone that LinkedIn would describe as a second connection had made a 30 Under 30 list. I had heard of this person, but I had never heard of them doing anything worthy enough to make such a list. Nevermind the rest of the inudstry, I could name a bunch of people that worked for the same company that have done more noteworthy things. And there was one person in particular that absolutely should have been on that list. Whenever their name comes up in conversation, I always have to say how incredible they are.

And I have the numbers to prove it, since while I was #2 on my first two projects, they were #1. And they were also a junior.

My revelation wasn't that 30 Under 30 lists are bullshit, even though they are. My revelation was that that people felt towards me the exact same way I felt about the #1, and I never absorbed it or actually believed I was worthy of their praise because my mind took it, locked it away, and told me a negative instead.

I have a first class degree, yet my mind tells me that's not an achievement because it wasn't a "real course". I've helped make games played by millions of people, yet my mind disregards that because they are games for children.

I probably didn't get taken out of that English lesson because of the "should of / should have" incident, but that is the thing that the dark side of my mind has chosen to cling on to because it knows it can hurt me with, while somewhere in the good side is a memory of that same teacher telling me how I was really good at giving characters distinct identities.

For years, people have repeatedly told me how talented I am, how valuable of an asset I am, and how projects would have never made it out the door without me, but, if all those things were true, how come I'd never made one of those 30 Under 30 lists? And the answer is simply that nobody has ever put me forward for one, because they either don't care about them or they think that I didn't care, but my mind will ignore that in favour of the narrative that I'm worthless.

On the first day of making games, after quitting my job, the self-therapy question came to me again. "When was the last time you were happy?" And I had an answer. It was right then.

These past couple of months have been the best I have felt in a long time. There's still some things I need to work on before my mind feels whole, but depression and anxiety seem to have wandered off and I hope that they've wandered back to where I used to live and jumped on the train tracks so they never come back.

The reality is they'll be back. They're like Daleks. Or Palpatine. They're never truly gone. Actually, comparing to those is not fair because I love Sheev, and the Daleks are kinda cool sometimes. But hopefully when they do come back, I'll remember my revelation and see them on their way. Depression and anxiety, that is. Sci-fi villains usually can't be defeated with good vibes.