How I Earned My Place in Games

In part 2, I finally got the job — with a test waiting on the other side of it.

I'd come into Game District as a trainee, on lower pay than everyone around me, with a simple deal: prove what I could do, and my pay would follow. Then they handed me the test that would decide it.

This is the part where everything that came before — the broken laptop, the rejections, the interview I froze in — finally added up to something. This is part 3, the last one.

#The test

The deal was simple, and a little terrifying. In 3 months, build 10 of 12 small games from scratch — real, playable ones, each with its own set of levels. Clones of the hyper-casual hits everyone knew back then: a Helix Jump, a Snake.io, a 2048-style 3D merge, a Bridge Race. The games themselves weren't really the point. The point was to see what I was made of — how I thought, how quickly I learned, what I could actually ship on my own.

Most new hires weren't expected to finish all of them. The whole thing was built to push you past your limit and find out where that limit was.

I should have been intimidated. Instead, I couldn't believe my luck. They were going to pay me to sit and build one game after another, all day, every day? That wasn't a test to me. That was everything I'd ever wanted, handed to me and called a job.

#So I disappeared into it

Every game was a new puzzle, and I loved each one. How does the ball actually punch through the rings in a Helix Jump? How should a snake grow and turn so it feels right under your thumb? I'd build one, polish it until it played the way it should, and go straight into the next — not because a clock was ticking, but because I genuinely couldn't wait to start the one after it.

When I finally looked up, I'd built 11 of the 12. It had taken me 2 months and 15 days.

I wasn't chasing a record. I just loved the work too much to stop.

#What it led to

That stretch was meant to take a full 3 months, and most people weren't expected to clear it at all. I'd done more than was asked, in less time than was given — and after that, things moved quickly.

They took me off the practice games and put me on real ones: production titles with actual players waiting. I started designing core systems — the architecture underneath a game, not just the surface. And before long I was being pulled into concept meetings for the bigger projects, sitting in the rooms where the real decisions got made.

A few months earlier, I'd frozen on a single line of code in an interview. Now I was helping decide how whole games would be built. I still think about that gap — how short the distance really was, and how impossibly far it had felt.

#The thing I never saw coming

Months in, a new group came through the studio on a visit — students from GameTrain, the same program I'd come up through, touring the partner studios in Lahore to see real game development up close. It was the exact trip I'd once been too poor to take.

This time, I was on the other side of it. The head of HR called me into the meeting room — just me — to meet them, and to show them what excellence in this work could look like. Or at least, that's how it was put to me.

Then, with me standing right there in front of all of them, they turned to the room and said:

"Sheeraz might not even know this yet, but he's one of the best game developers we've ever had here."

I didn't know what to do with that. I'd been making games for a matter of months. Not long before, I'd been one of them — a gamer from a village with a broken laptop, getting turned away by everyone I asked for a way in. And now I was the example they were holding up.

I won't pretend I'd found some secret. I hadn't. All I ever really did was love the work enough to keep going at it — past the rejections, past the freeze, past every good reason to give up. I didn't have the degree, or the right city, or the safe path. I just had the one thing that turned out to matter most: I couldn't stay away from it.

#Where it became real

That's the whole story — from a broken laptop in Ghotki to a studio I was proud to build games for.

I'm still on this road, and I think I always will be. There have been other studios since, other kinds of games, things I've gotten to make that the kid with the cracked screen could never have pictured. But this was where it became real — where "I want to make games" quietly turned into "I make games."

If you've read all three parts, thank you, truly. I wrote this for anyone sitting where I once sat: wanting something badly, with no clear way in, and every reason to believe it just isn't meant for people like them. I promise you it can be. You don't need permission, or the perfect background, or the safe path. You only need to love it enough to keep showing up — and to keep going when the answer is no.

It took me a long time to hear my first yes. But it came. Yours can too.