Hey Everyone
My name is Lucas — though most of my friends call me Lucky. I’m 29 years old, and as boring as it sounds, I’ve been fascinated by games for as long as I can remember. Game Development has always been something I wanted to do as a kid. What started as a hobby, slowly grew into my lifelong passion. I want to try something new, and while I am not a very good writer, I love sharing experiences and teaching others.
It may be a little old school, but I think a blog will be a great way to share my personal story and struggles along the way, while also learning a little about web development and improving my writing skills.
This space will be where I share the ups and downs of development: design decisions, technical experiments, systems that worked (and ones that definitely didn’t), as well as art, writing, and anything else that shapes the journey. My hope is that it’s not just a record of progress, but something fun and inspiring to read — whether you’re a fellow dev, a sci-fi fan, or just someone who enjoys peeking behind the scenes of game creation.
Living with ADD
For the longest time, I’ve been struggling, and I’m more than happy to share my story. I was diagnosed with ADD very early in life, saw doctors, went to therapy, and took medication. I struggled in school and even had to repeat a year due to bullying, because I was insanely annoying without medication — talking nonstop, not paying attention, or answering something completely wrong because I simply wasn’t listening (something I still do today, but I’ve trained myself to get better at it).
Unironically, during that repeat year I met some amazing people who I still call my best friends today — people who accepted me for who I am. Despite ADD medication being very useful, for those who know, it is potent and also incredibly draining. I stopped taking ADD medication or seeing a doctor, thinking it would make me more independent. Instead, it made my final years in school and my bachelor’s study far more difficult — and miserable — than they had to be.
I fought depression, and while I scraped by getting my high school diploma, I later failed to submit my thesis during my bachelor’s study a few years later. I was at my lowest low, and at that point I knew I needed help again. I sought out a therapist who got me on the right path again, and while I felt ashamed at first, I realized it wasn’t my fault. Like a broken arm, there are missing synapses in my brain that I simply can’t repair by myself.
If I can’t find my keys for the 25th time or misplace my wallet in the fridge, I can laugh about it now and simply accept the fact that I am different. For anyone struggling with ADD — I’ve been there, and looking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.
With the help of therapy, I now hold a B.A. in Interactive Animation and Game Art, as well as an M.A. in Media Management and Communication, graduating with respectably good grades. I am now on a good path in life. I joined a startup working on an incredibly passionate project with amazing and talented people, and I can even put some time aside now to work on an additional hobby project — this very roguelite game that has been stuck in my head for a few years now.
How I got into Game Development
What drew me to game art initially was my fascination for animation and 3D design. I messed around with Maya and Cinema 4D during school trying to replicate weapons and rigging robots and watched videos about game development like other’s read books or play sports. It taught me the basics and confirmed that game dev was an area I wanted to commit to fully enrolling into the bachelor study.
Some of my favorite models (and ancient screenshots) are from around 2015 when I was just applying for my bachelor’s study. I realized that animation required a lot more dedication than I was able to handle back then. However, I discovered that setting up a rigged character from scratch — developing IK/FK systems, limiting movement, preventing gimbal lock, or adding constraints — created a deep fascination for the craft.
At the time, I didn’t know it yet, but coding shares a lot of similarities: setting up systems, discovering frameworks, and trying to prevent certain things from happening. Coding was something I never thought I would pick up, but more on that in a bit!
Delving Into Code
I was terrible at math in school, and the little programming we learned was enough for me to stay far away from it. While I loved learning languages, coding was like hieroglyphs to me. Unreal Engine introduced me to the Blueprint system, a node-based coding editor. As a visual learner I have a far easier time looking at colored nodes and execution wires than staring at a big block of text.
In our startup, we needed more help in the coding department, and I was gifted a Udemy course teaching me the very basics. I barely understood a thing, but the idea of object-oriented programming — with concepts I was already familiar with through rigging and modeling — fascinated me, and I kept digging. I checked out a few more tutorials out there on the internet and came across a series I still share with new coders: Learn to Code in UE5 – 1 – Programming Basics by Coqui Games. It’s great for someone with very little experience, and I truly recommend it to anyone getting started. It covers the basics of coding and later delves into Blueprints and more advanced systems like interfaces, dispatchers, and components.
That’s where it truly clicked for me. What makes coding truly fun is having a clear goal in mind. Back in school, what always bothered me was learning about things without context. Who would have thought that dissecting a triangle a million different ways would now help me calculate vectors and design a modular star system map for this very game? I even learned to love math, because now I not only understand it much better — it has purpose, and it’s usable in a very fun way.
Impostor Syndrome is a feeling everyone will go through but all I can say is to start small but with a very clear goal in mind. Do you want to learn about UI, make a simply menu system to flip between starting your game and an options menu. It sounds boring at first but you will realize very soon (especially the more hours you accumulate) what is truly possible and you will surprise yourself ending up creating a fleshed out framework.
A little showcase of some more advanced development work. Could I have done this at the very beginning of my journey? Absolutely not. But as you dive deeper into any engine, you start to uncover the amazing systems you can access and shape. To me, that’s the most fun part of coding — realizing what’s possible. And with every step forward, it’s not just your coding that grows, but your understanding of yourself and what you’re truly capable of.
Where I am now
I’ve put several thousand hours into Unreal Engine by now. While I still haven’t touched C++, I can read and understand its core concepts. What I do have is a deep understanding of the Blueprint system. I’ve grown to love modular, clean design — building frameworks, managing data, and working with data assets, tables, and interfaces. I truly believe that creating a roguelite grounded in these systems is not only a great way to prove myself but also to keep growing as a developer.
It took a lot of patience and quite a bit of dedication — something I’ve always struggled with due to my ADD — but this has given me a purpose in life that keeps me going. Luckily one of the perks of ADD is that we tend to get hyper-focused on the things we truly enjoy. I want to shout out a coding colleague and someone I consider a very good friend of mine who kept pushing me and always believed in my abilities. He always pushed me and truly saw a coder in me – something I always shrugged off and laughed at. Now, I am a technical designer at the very same startup, and I’ve fully committed all my passion and time into learning more and more about system development.
I never thought coding would be part of my life, yet now it’s something I wouldn’t give up for anything. My life has completely flipped within the last 10 years — moving from the very beginnings of 3D modeling all the way to becoming a fully committed tech dev. I hope that for whoever reads this, you take away that life is all about ups and downs. We all go through them. Some struggle harder than others, but it’s all about finding our way in this world.
I had some incredibly horrendous times in life, but it always gets better. Life is a rollercoaster, and no matter how bad you feel now, it gets better again. There is always a path for you. Unironically, the game I am working on now will feature a lot of these struggles: pathfinding, perseverance, and discovering true meaning in a deep-space universe that I can’t wait to share more of very soon.
The Road Ahead
In future dev logs, I’ll be diving deeper into the early beginnings of the DeepSpace story, exploring the gameplay systems, and sharing all the little discoveries and experiments that happen in between. My goal is not just to show progress, but to bring you along for the journey — to give you a glimpse behind the scenes and build a community around this universe as it grows. I hope this little peek into my life and my work has been enjoyable and I will talk to you real soon!
Until then, fly safe everyone and welcome to DeepSpace! o7