For the past 8 years I’ve been working as technical designer and UI programmer, helping many different enterprises build standardized tools and UI systems for their products. The experiences I have worked on often had a strong multiplayer component, ranging from Corporate VR “metaverses” to Arena shooters in the web3 space and battle-royale games.
Looking at what I’ve been doing, I find it funny that I ended up being a Technical Designer, since I didn’t even know it was a term when I got started, but in hindsight it was exactly what I was always meant to be. Just like anybody else who wants to join the industry, I wanted to be a game designer, but I also have a strong need for structure and, according to many people around me, I am an engineer at heart. The natural consequence for me was to find a niche where design skills were needed, but where I could build through code or visual scripting.
I just realized that you may not even know what a TD is! So, according to programmers we are more of designers, as we often do front-end and UX/UI work, but for the actual designers, we are programmers, as we use black magic to make stuff move! It is a weird position to be in, but I genuinely love it. I can talk to both worlds as one of their peers, and use my structure-craving mind to build beauty in an efficient way!