Why I insisted on making games

By Lucas Nunes, Associate Game Engineer · August 2026

Why I insisted on making games

From a buggy college project to game engineer on Sniper3D.

My first contact with programming was in 2023, when I started my Computer Science degree and built my first game, right there at university. The project had a three month deadline, and even though it was that short and the result was very simple, full of bugs, and far from what I had in mind, here I am, 36 months later, still making games and with no deadline to stop.

"You have potential way beyond this"

Honestly, falling for it so fast and so early was pretty scary. Everyone around me was talking about Silicon Valley, big tech, finance... And when I interned at a bank to try out that reality my classmates wanted so badly, I found nothing comparable to the feeling of watching a character you created jump across the screen. Most of the people I talked to about careers during that internship at the bank told me it would be a waste to dedicate myself to games, that I had "potential way beyond this," and it was pretty discouraging. But those spreadsheets full of dollar signs and tax ID numbers were unpalatable to me. They didn't mean anything.

Three days sitting next to people who do this every day

It was shortly after that experience that I came across Wildlife. I was lucky enough to be one of the few students at the time who got to take part in the company's internal hackathon, for which our newly founded university game development club had managed to secure a few spots. They welcomed us at the office and seated us right next to professional teams doing this for a living every day. For them, it was just another day making games for literally billions of players. So after three days of hanging out, competing, and scrambling to ship a prototype, I realized there was no going back: it was make games or make games.

The mission was to come back

The mission was clear now: after meeting so many people inside Wildlife who motivated me to keep building what I loved and who showed me what daily life inside a studio looks like, I had to come back and sit next to them one more time. On top of that, it was without a doubt one of the biggest opportunities I could get in this industry in Brazil.

So I dove even deeper into learning: I took part in countless other game jams (game development hackathons), of every size and with all kinds of teams, sometimes with people I had never met. I met a lot of people in the industry, mostly indie developers, worked on my own projects, got more and more involved with the university's game development club, and eventually landed my first job in the field.

I started working at an indie studio here in São Paulo in early 2024. Every day was a challenge: I was building with technologies I had never touched, alongside extremely capable people, still in university, and just one year after my first line of code. It was a tough battle, but the experience and the learning were certainly proportional.

Still, I was hungry to work at one of the big companies in the industry, with more people and more reach. So, eight months into that studio, the moment came for goodbyes and a complete change of focus. I thanked my coworkers for the opportunity and for all their support, resigned, and invested in Wildlife's internship selection process, which was about to begin.

The selection process and landing on Sniper3D

The process was technically demanding, the best game development has to offer. The interviews were challenging, but at every step I could see how interested the interviewers were in hiring people who had the same passion I did. It had everything it needed to work out, and it did. My internship started in January 2025, in game engineering, on the Sniper3D team.

Overnight, I became part of the team responsible for maintaining a game at a scale I had never worked with before. It was, and still is, a reliable challenge, but an extremely rewarding one, and my team made sure I was well supported throughout the entire process, without sacrificing my autonomy and trusting me with tasks that really mattered to the game. It is what I consider an ideal internship.

Today, a game engineer

Today, a little over a year later, I'm a game engineer on Sniper3D, no longer an intern. I keep building all kinds of features in the game, moving from interface to gameplay, from economy to retention, and always in active conversation with other areas (art, product, marketing, and so on), working very closely together. Doing what I love, next to people who love it too, each of us supporting the others in this career and in this dream.

Make games. Just start.

For anyone who shares that same drive and wants to build a path in game development, my recommendation is simple: make games. Just start. It won't be perfect, it won't turn out the way you wanted, it won't work perfectly, but you will have made a game. Join as many game jams as you can, meet as many people as you can, and exchange as many ideas, because the growth and the learning come out of that process. It is a complex field, and experience and the same portfolio make a real difference. But more than that: make games in order to make games, to entertain people, to express something, to inspire. Whatever you want, just make it. I promise it's worth it.