How did I start my game developer career? / EN

I started my software education in high school, but I would like to share an old memory to explain the game developer in me. When I was little, I think I was in middle school, I was interested in game developers. While talking about the bugs in Pes (a football game) with friends on the street, I made a funny and childish claim like “If I knew how to do it, I would do it better and better quality”. Of course, I had no idea about software at that time.

Then I started M.K.Coşkun Oz High School. In the 9th grade, I bought a book about the Java programming language and started to learn software on my own. I was very excited when I wrote my first “Hello World” programme. Then I started the Computer Systems Department in High School. In the 11th grade, I developed my own game called “CountryBall Wars” in my spare time while doing an internship. This game achieved an unexpected success by receiving hundreds of thousands of downloads and took me further in the software world.

In 12th grade, my teacher and I developed an assistant project for the visually impaired and participated in the TUBITAK competition. This project involved an assistant that works on mobile devices and provides support to visually impaired individuals. Although our TUBITAK project, unfortunately, did not get a degree, but this experience taught me a lot.
Now I had to start preparing for university. When I was in the last semester of 12th grade, I looked at the courses of different schools in Turkey and abroad, compared them and decided. I realised that the cost of studying at Warsaw Technical University would be almost the same as a university in Turkey. For this, I had started practicing foreign languages, but with the COVID-19 pandemic, I cancelled this plan and decided to improve myself by taking online courses. However, in the meantime, I made perhaps the biggest mistake of my life. Even if you spend all your time learning something, it is almost useless unless you put what you have learned into practice and it is gradually forgotten. Since I was curious about all areas and a little greedy, I exploited all the resources I could find (Cisco Academy, Coursera, Bitwise, Udemy, etc…). It was important to learn the information, but it was even more important to make projects that would show that I knew them. With my current mind, I wish I had kept the trainings as a start and spent most of my time doing projects. However, experience is experience.

Then I started to learn game development with C++ through an online course. I had decided that I was going to progress in the game industry and I was looking for deeper knowledge to develop it. At this point, a friend of mine told me about Ecole 42 and said that it was exactly my idea. Spoiler: In the end, he was not wrong 🙂

I can say that one of my biggest mistakes in my software adventure, which I studied for so many years, was being asocial and not reaching enough network. Even if you know everything, as long as you are not in the right place, unfortunately, the doors may not open to you as you want. This is the reality of life.
When I first heard about Ecole 42, I thought it was a simple project, but when I researched a little more, I was very interested and I felt lucky to have such a project in Turkiye.

Firstly, I passed the online test and started the 1-month Piscine period. I met interesting people during the pool period and maybe for the first time in my life, I communicated with so many people at once. I learned a lot and taught a lot.
After completing the Piscine period, we started the long-term Common core, where the most beautiful thing was to experience almost all areas from the most basic. Together with various projects, we did various projects in system administration, game development, web development, etc. Due to the school system, I could express myself much more easily and transfer what I knew to the other side more easily.

While I was still in Common Core education, I wanted to participate in a mobile game event called Mobidictum, and I went to this event with Ayberk, who I met at school, later my roommate and now my colleague. We got in touch with many people there and introduced ourselves. We were lucky to meet Panteon, one of the leading game companies in Turkey, and they were impressed by both of our backgrounds and software careers. When Common Core was over at our school, we moved to Ankara and started working on a very nice project there.

And Erdoğan, another friend of mine from Ecole42, came to us after finishing his internship. Now the three of us are working together on a very nice project at Panteon 🙂