Bad Grades

Years ago, when I was in what was supposed to be my final year of University, I decided to drop out of engineering. The people were great, my marks were fine. I just didn’t have passion for it and the idea of spending the rest of my life doing something I didn’t care about was enough for me to throw in the towel.

Lucky for me there was another option. I had taken an Intro to Computer Science course a couple semesters prior, one where we were taught about object oriented programming in C++. I wasn’t a good student but it sparked something in me. That semester I made my first ever game; a simple 4 letter word ladder in command line. It was fun enough to play but captivating to make. 

So in my final year of my bachelor’s degree, on the drop day of the semester, at 2 in the afternoon, I walked up to the academic advisor and asked for her help. She pulled out her course catalog and swapped all my classes so I could pursue a degree in Computer Science instead. If I did things exactly right, and if I took a few courses over the following summer, it’d set me back a year. Not dropping out would have set me back further.

The choice was simple. It was hardly a choice at all, really. I loved programming. I wasn’t any good at it, nor was I aware of what may await me after graduation, but in the months since that Intro to Computer Science course I had created a few programs that convinced me this is the thing for me. I want to make things with code.

The transition into Computer Science was a bit rough, seeing as I’d already missed a couple of weeks of the semester with a full course load. I was not a good student, and to be honest I barely passed some of my required courses. 

Even so, many evenings I’d sit at a cheap glass topped office desk in my childhood home typing away, music playing, coffee in hand. Making things. One program was a perlin noise terrain generator. Another was a grid based heat dissipation simulation. Small programs with no audience. They weren’t all that fun to look at but I was truly obsessed in making them. So obsessed, in fact, that I’d routinely stay up until the following morning working on them. My father would poke his head into the room where I was working to say a cheeky ‘Good morning’, then I’d join him and my mother over their morning coffee and chat before heading to bed as the sun rose. I missed many morning classes from my obsession, and pulled a lot of all nighters. It was the best time of my life.

This obsession was channeled into a single project starting in my first year in Computer Science. I wanted to make a game, one where you can command any modern day country in a land-grab simulation. Almost like a more granular version of Risk, or a bite sized version of a grand strategy game like Europa Universalis.  I had made 3 or 4 prototypes for a game like this already, albeit on a reduced scale, but not quite like I was envisioning. 

So I pulled some more all nighters, I implemented some ideas, I learned some concepts. Every piece that I added begged another piece to be designed, created new problems, and added scope. The project was massive, complex, and had no roadmap to be completed. In fact, I was sure it’d never be finished even as I worked on it. I worked on it in the evening, I worked on it at my part time job, I worked on it at the University, I even worked on it as I sat in the back of my Intro to Game Programming course. I was an awful student, and I got poor grades in that class too. 

I worked on that game for over two years. It never had a name, it was never completed, and apart from showing it to a few friends and family nobody knew it even existed. But it was exactly what I wanted to make and the feeling of absolute freedom I had while working on it is the reason why I kept game development as a hobby years later. That project was the template. I found the files for that project and played it for a couple days recently; it was pretty fun.

I think about that version of myself a lot now. I didn’t know what was coming and even if I could warn myself I’m not sure what I could have said to prepare for the insanity. I’m not even sure if there’s a lesson to learn.

With all the success, baggage, attention, heartache, fear, stress, and joy that I’ve had since Balatro was created, at least that old version of myself is still there. Last night I stayed up until the early hours of the morning drawing pixel art, writing code, and listening to music in my quiet house. Notebook of ideas open next to me, cup of decaf in hand.

Thank you to everyone for allowing this terrible student to keep staying up too late.

Happy 2nd birthday, Balatro 

P.S. Yes I’m still working on 1.1