leading a team and building an engine - luminobyte

Date : 04-2023

okay this is a step up i did not see coming. i'm the lead developer at LuminoByte Studios now. LEAD. me. the deal is i build the game engine and the core mechanics, and on top of that i'm the one authorizing and managing the team, deciding who works on what and keeping everyone pointed the same direction. going from "kid who tests other people's software" to "person the team looks to" in like half a year is a lot, in the best way

building the engine itself is the dream part. all those years of poking at löve, rebuilding UI systems, obsessing over how a car should FEEL when it drifts, it's all funneling into actually architecting a core that other people build their game on top of. and that's the scary part too, because when it's just my project a bad decision only hurts me, but here if i design a mechanic badly the whole team inherits my mistake. it's teaching me to think about code as something other people have to live inside, not just something that runs

the managing side is a whole separate skill i'm learning on the fly. turns out leading isn't about being the best coder in the room, it's about unblocking people and making decisions fast enough that nobody's stuck waiting on you. i'm not naturally great at it yet, i'd rather just head-down build. but being forced to zoom out and think about the team and the direction instead of only the next function, that's stretching a part of my brain that solo projects never touch. big year