How I Got My First Game Dev Job

The moment I learned how games are actually built, I was hooked.

I'd loved playing them my whole life. But making them turned out to be a different kind of joy entirely — and it became mine the instant I started. Learning it was never going to be the hard part. Getting someone to pay me to do it was.

In part 1, after a year of trying with nothing to show for it, I'd finally landed a seat in a game development course I never thought I'd get into. This part is everything that came after — the interview that fell apart, the weeks of silence, and the gamble that changed everything.

This is part 2.

#3 months to prove it

The course was run by GameTrain, a software training studio in Lahore. 3 months, fully online, 9 to 6 every day. At the end, the best students would be sent to interview with real studios. That was the whole prize — not a certificate, but a real shot at a job.

I'd joined a week late, but catching up never felt like a chore. I was obsessed. The class ran 9 to 6, but mine ran past midnight — not because anyone asked me to, but because I couldn't make myself stop. I'd finish the day's lessons and keep going on my own, chasing down anything about games that caught my eye, building little things just to see if I could. Some days were 16 hours long and they flew by. For the first time in my life, learning didn't feel like studying. It felt like play.

I wasn't starting from nothing — but I wasn't far from it, either. I'd built Discord bots before, sure, but mostly by gluing together snippets and answers I found online. I didn't really understand the fundamentals, and I wouldn't have called myself a real developer. C# was a whole new world. I started at the very beginning — what a class even is, how to write a function, how all the pieces fit together. It came quickly, faster than I'd expected, because I simply couldn't put it down.

What carried me was my own curiosity. I was so into this that I kept wandering off the course path — reading about things we hadn't reached yet, breaking stuff, trying ideas that had nothing to do with that week's lesson. And whenever I got stuck, my mentors were there: Muhammad Hadi, Wasim Akram, Aqib Shafiq, and the rest of the staff at GameTrain. They stayed back after class, again and again, and patiently helped me understand whatever I'd gone off chasing — even the things that had nothing to do with the course. I owe them more than I can say.

My very first build was tiny: a little car on a floating road, straight out of the course's opening unit. You steered it with the arrow keys and tried not to hit the obstacles. The first time I wrote a line of C# and watched that car actually roll forward across the screen, that old "Hello World" feeling came rushing back — but bigger. I had made something move. By the end of those 3 months, making games had stopped feeling like a course I was taking. It felt like the thing I was meant to do.

There was only one part I couldn't be part of. Near the end, my class got the chance to visit real game studios in Lahore — to walk in and see, with my own eyes, how the games I loved were actually made. I wanted that more than I know how to put into words. But the trip cost money I didn't have, and my parents had even less. They would have found it for me somehow if I'd asked — and that's exactly why I didn't. I couldn't put the weight of a want, just a want, onto people who were already giving me everything they had. So I stayed home while the others went, and I told myself my turn would come.

#The interview I froze in

Then the course ended, and the calls started.

One by one, my classmates were getting hired. My first interview was with the studio I wanted most — I'd had my eye on it from the moment I learned the course could lead there. Just being on that call felt like a dream. And the person interviewing me was someone I genuinely looked up to: a team lead with the kind of game knowledge and industry experience I could only hope to have one day.

I sat at my desk back home in Ghotki, nervous and hopeful. We talked about games and engines, and that part went well. Then they asked me to write a small piece of code, right there on the call — a simple function that returns the power of a number.

And here's the part that still gets me: I knew how to do it.

But my mind started racing. Should I use Unity's built-in Mathf.Pow? Or write it out with a loop — wait, a loop, for something that already has a built-in function? That's wasteful, they'd never like that. And what if they didn't like my approach either way?

The more I overthought it, the less I could do. I couldn't type a single line. I just sat there, frozen, staring at an empty screen. My first real game development interview, at the studio I wanted more than any other, in front of someone I admired — and it was all too much. I just wasn't in my senses.

I knew I'd lost it before the call even ended. They never called back.

#The silence

Then came the part I wasn't ready for: nothing.

A week passed. Then another. One by one, the rest of my class got hired, and my phone stayed silent. Slowly, I understood why. Most of them had computer science degrees. I didn't. They lived near Lahore, where the studios were. I was a whole province away, back in my village. On paper, I was the easy one to skip.

I had come so far — found the work I loved, fought my way into that course, poured every hour I had into it. And now it looked like it might all end right here, quietly, just short of everything.

#The gamble

So I did something that scared me.

If every studio was in Lahore, then I would go to Lahore — the same city I couldn't afford to even visit a month before. Except this time it wasn't for a tour. It was to go and find a real opportunity at a real studio.

Because deep down, I believed the passion I'd found for making games had to lead somewhere. I didn't know where yet. What I knew was what I wanted: to be a game developer at a studio that would actually pay me to make games. To earn a living doing the thing I loved. To get better at it the only way that's real — by building actual games on a real team, and learning what it truly takes to finish and ship one.

It was a risk, and it was the only move I could see. So I took the bet.

My parents didn't have much, but they put together around 15,000 rupees and pressed it into my hands — more than they could really spare. I knew this was my one shot, and that somehow, with that little, I had to make it work. I packed one bag and left for a city where I knew almost no one. My older brother's old roommate let me sleep on his floor.

Then I made that money stretch as far as it would go. For days I walked — kilometres at a time, studio to studio — instead of paying for rides, because every rupee had to cover rent, food, and the next day of trying. It was the same thing I'd done years before, walking street to street to find someone who'd teach me to code. Only now I knew a little more, and I had a lot less to lose.

#The phone call

One of those studios was Game District. The interview felt good — really good. And then, again, silence. Days went by with no answer, while my 15,000 rupees kept shrinking and every day in the city cost money I didn't have.

I was almost out of money, and almost out of hope. So I went back to the people who had never let me down — my mentors. I met Wasim in person for the first time, and within a day he'd found me another lead and set up a new interview, a couple of days away. A backup. A reason to hold on a little longer.

The evening before that backup interview, my phone rang.

It was Game District. I had the job.

I still can't describe the sound I made. What I remember is how hard it was to get the words out when I called home — how my voice broke in the middle of telling my parents that the money, the bag, the floor in a stranger's house, all of it had been worth it. After a year of trying — after every rejection and every silent week — I had finally found my opportunity: a real chance to make something out of game development, the true passion I'd discovered in myself.

#One last test

I had the job — but I came in as a trainee, on lower pay than the others. I didn't settle for that, though. I'd worked out a deal: from there on, what I earned would rise with how well I performed.

And to measure that, there was a test waiting — a run of work most new hires weren't even expected to finish in the time they were given, built to show exactly what someone could do. I didn't fully grasp that yet. All I knew was that I hadn't come this far to let it slip.

What I did with it — and how fast — is the part of this whole story I'm proudest of. But that's part 3.

For now, I'll leave it here. If you're somewhere in the hard part right now — sending out your work, hearing nothing back, wondering if your turn is ever going to come — I hope this one stays with you. I'm not special. I was just someone who got told no, again and again, and kept going anyway. If that's you too, I'd love for you to keep going — and to come back for the last part, where all of it finally paid off.