How I Got Into Game Development

A few years ago, I was just another gamer in a small town in Pakistan, playing on a broken laptop. I had no idea how the games I loved were actually made.

Today, I make games for a living.

This is the story of how I crossed that distance. This is part 1.

#I was a gamer first

Before any of this, I was a gamer — and not a casual one.

For more than 16 years, I played to win: top 10% in most games I touched, mostly shooters like Counter-Strike 1.6 and CS:GO. For years, I had one dream — to go pro.

But deep down, I knew it would never happen. Where I lived, professional gaming wasn't a career — no teams, no tournaments, no way in. And even if there had been, I was far too poor to chase it.

I grew up in a village in Ghotki, in Sindh, Pakistan, where fast internet was a luxury. My laptop's screen was cracked and dead, so I ran it on an old monitor — a basic machine with no graphics card, playing whatever it could.

So I knew games — how they feel, why some just work. I just had no idea how anyone actually built one. That world felt impossibly far from mine.

#Teaching myself to code

On Discord, I noticed a few people building their own bots — little programs that run tasks on their own. I'd never pictured myself making software. But watching them, a quiet thought crept in: maybe I could learn this too.

So I Googled "best programming language to learn." The answer that kept coming back was C++. With no teacher and no plan — just YouTube and time — a free course by Code with Harry became my classroom.

At the end of January 2021, I wrote my first real program. All it did was show two words on a black screen: "Hello World!"

I know how small that sounds. But I still remember staring at it. I had given a computer an instruction, and it had listened. Something clicked. I wanted to build things.

Then the road got steep. The deeper I went, the harder it got — and with no one to ask, the excitement slowly drained out of me, until one day I simply stopped.

#The door that didn't open

After a while, I decided I needed a real teacher — a person, not a video.

But the computer centers in my city only taught the basics: Microsoft Office, a simple web page. I joined one anyway, sat through spreadsheet formulas until the boredom won, and left.

Then I heard about a man in my city who built websites for a living — someone people respected. Nobody had his number, just a rough idea of his neighborhood.

So I went to find him. I walked through streets lined with hundreds of houses, asking, guessing, hoping. And somehow, I found the right door.

I knocked. He opened it himself, half-asleep — I think I'd woken him from an afternoon nap. Standing on his doorstep in the heat, I told him I just wanted to learn to code. I offered to pay him whatever I could. I offered to work for free. Anything, if he would only teach me.

He said no. He couldn't help me. We never made it past his doorstep, and I walked home with nothing.

That rejection broke something in me. I stopped completely — no tutorials, no code, nothing — for almost two months. As far as I was concerned, that part of my life was over.

What I didn't know was that the thing that would pull me back was waiting in the last place I'd have thought to look.

#Finding my way back

It was Discord — the very place that had started all of this.

For those two months I'd been there again, not to learn, just to be around other gamers and forget coding entirely. But little by little, I drifted into other rooms: ones full of developers, sharing what they built. And there I found a language I'd never tried — JavaScript.

JavaScript made sense to me in a way C++ never had. I didn't need ten lines of code just to see a result. Without quite noticing, my excitement came rushing back. I started building my own Discord bots and putting them online, free, for anyone to use.

The one I'm proudest of is Sherry Music Bot. Other bots locked their best features behind payment — audio effects that turn an ordinary song into a calm "lofi" version, or a slowed, echoing remix. I built all of it and gave it away for nothing.

It spread fast. Soon, in a community of more than 10,000 people, my name was known for the things I'd made. I wasn't earning money — but I was earning something I valued far more: a real name among other developers, the kind of respect that only comes from building something people genuinely love to use. That kept me going.

#The video that changed everything

Then, in September 2021, a single video changed the direction of my life.

It was called "Game Development in Pakistan," by Mooroo, a famous Pakistani vlogger, sponsored by a training program called GameTrain in Lahore.

Until that moment, I had no idea people even made games in Pakistan — it had never once crossed my mind. Suddenly there was a door I didn't know existed, in my own country. I clicked, and I couldn't look away.

So I applied. A GameTrain mentor named Muhammad Sufyan interviewed me. He was a Counter-Strike player too, so we spent most of it talking about games. (To this day, the best interview I've ever had.)

But then came the bad news. I was about a week too late. The program had started, every seat was full, and there was no room unless someone dropped out. I said I understood. I hadn't expected much anyway — I'd applied just to see what might happen.

#The door that opened

Two days later, my phone rang again.

One of the chosen students couldn't join. A single seat had opened — and they were offering it to me.

I think about that moment often. I had done everything I could, and still been turned away, again and again. There was nothing left to try. And then, out of nowhere, the door opened on its own.

I've come to believe that what's truly meant for you finds its way to you — often through a path you never planned, at the moment you've stopped expecting it. Call it destiny, call it God's plan — I only know it wasn't me who forced that door open this time. All I had to do was say yes.

So I did. With everything in me — yes.

And just like that, after a year of dead ends and closed doors, after almost giving up for good, I was in. To this day, I thank God for that one empty seat.

This was where it truly began — though nowhere near the end of the hard part. Inside GameTrain, I'd have to learn an entire craft from nothing, fast. And the hardest battle was still ahead: getting a real studio to take a chance on someone like me. That's part 2.

But that night, none of it mattered yet. After every door that had shut in my face, one had finally opened — not by my hand, but somehow, right on time. And this time, I walked through it.

If you've ever wanted something so badly it hurt, with no clear way to reach it, I'd love for you to walk the rest of this road with me. The hardest — and the best — parts are still to come.