When you find out that your career is not going to where you want, you need to take action.
I was the Lead Game Developer on Create for Life and I was having a blast, learning how to handle a team, how to take good strategic decisions and how to behave as a leader.
Sadly, even if that was awesome I was missing some skills I wanted to learn, I was guessing how to create a succesful game, it felt like tossing coins all the time until one hit, and evene then I was having a bad time figuring out why it worked so I could replicate it, I started to feel that I was doing a bad job.
For me the easiest solution, and also the hardest one talking about my feelings, was to leave the studio and find another one with far more experience that I can absorb and finally learn how to make a succesful game.
First I went too high, I chose Unity itself, tried three times and failed ona ll three for different reasons, one was the final interview, the next one failed because of VISA acquisition problems and the last one the position was removed from LinkedIn.
Then something happend in the studio, my coworkers started to move to Amber, this studio was the one that acquired Karaokulta recently, another small studio in the city, tho small it received a lot of light from the industry, I am sure that was the reason this Rumanian company found it.
When our leader Game Designer resigned to go to Amber I talked with him, what he said clicked me, I was working good but I was not working good where I wanted, when that clicked happened I knew it was time to really move too.
So I entered their website amberstudio.com.
This image was the first thing I saw, the companies caught my attention right away, these guys were working with big companies and they will start working from right here, from Guadalajara, I read ll the website, their philosophy of work and way of doing things enchanted me, I had to get in, it was my chance to turn into AAA quality development.
The problem was… they were not hiring Unity developers, only Unreal developers, my cross, one of the main reasons I could not apply to foreign jobs, the mighty Unreal I never learned because of being a Unity fanboy.
Another firend of mine wanted me to join Amber since November last year, but I keep refusing, finally was time to call him and start the shift.
First I contacted a recruiter for a Game Designer position, he liked my profile, then I asked him to switch me to a Game Programmer position, it worked, then I spoke with the Guild Lead and gave me a test, then I passed the test and spoke with the Global Guild Lead, asked me some questions and passed, everything was going too wel and it only took 2 weeks to happen, in 2 weeks I went from being on a company that didn’t fullfilled my expectations to being accepted on this huge company.
I have been having a great time working here, in my past job I learned pretty robust and solid code standards, and here we have more freedom, my Guild Lead told me that removing that freedom is bad, he prefer dirty code that no freedom to work with, I think it is a very interesting thought, maybe the freedom is better, we are on a creative industry, freedom and creativity are everything, perhaps I can improve my code with more freedom.
The project I got assigned is amazing, my resume will look awesome with that game on it, the team is huge and we all are working super hard on it.
AMBER is amazing!!
It was a hard choice, it was hard to leave Create for Life and come here, but I needed it.
The final price, the glory of being in this industry as a great developer is finally within my grasp, I will grow here and build myself here, become an important developer.