A new job!

tl;dr: I left Manticore Games, and I'm joining Meta's Horizon Worlds team!

My experience with Manticore Games?

I learned a lot during my time with Manticore Games, but it's time for me to move on.

They have yet to announce our game, so I still can't talk about it yet! Maybe I'll have another post for you when it's announced!

However, I can talk a bit about the public product that Manticore has supported for years now. They have a product called Core; it's a platform for players to make games on and then share them with other players. Like Roblox, but not as wildly successful. To support this platform, Manticore essentially has a game engine built on top of a game engine (they use the Unreal game engine underneath).

Most of my work for my first year and half at Manticore involved making tools and systems to support user-generated-content (UGC) creation in the Core editor, as well as systems to support dynamically loading and interacting with this UGC while playing a game. I really enjoyed this work! The Core editor supports content that intersects with most aspects of gameplay (e.g., player controls, camera systems, physics, movement, collisions, interactions, networking, UI, etc.), so I was able to touch a lot of systems, and create a lot new features. Additionally, I gain a lot of extra motivation when creating things that then enable further creation from others!

I switched to working on other core-systems features during my last year at Manticore—lots of interesting problems, but none quite as interesting as the UGC work I was doing before.

Also, I disagree with some aspects of the culture and the way things are led at Manticore (though, all the teammates I worked with are great, and I'd happily work with them again!).

I learned a lot early-on at Manticore—in particular, I learned a lot about the Unreal engine. But I wasn't really learning or growing as much during this last year.

Why leave?

💸💸💸

In general, I wasn't happy. I worked too hard at Manticore Games. My work-life balance was not ideal. I didn't have enough agency. I was a bit burnt-out. I wasn't growing my technical skillset much anymore. And the stuff I was working on more recently just wasn't quite as exciting to me. But, most significantly, I needed to make more money!

My offers from both Meta and Google would have me earning close to 3x as much in my first year as I was making at Manticore Games! That being said, I think Manticore Games pays comparably to most companies in the games industry. It's hard to earn enough money as a game developer!

Why Meta??

I'm still surprised I accepted Meta's offer!

I had some reservations about working at Meta. The company's public image is not always ideal, and I've heard mixed reviews about the work-life balance for Meta employees.

Also, my interview timing was bad. I'd also been talking with my old team at Google about returning, and they approved my return much faster than I expected! So I didn't think Meta would be able to extend an offer before I'd have to give a response to Google. I almost cancelled my Meta interviews at that point, but I thought I shouldn't do that until I had the actual official verbal offer from Google. But then Google ended up taking a couple extra weeks to get the official verbal offer to me...

The day Google finally got their verbal offer to me was also the day Meta told me I'd passed their full-panel interviews. However, I still didn't think Meta could compete, since their recruiter told me the final remaining step—team-fit interviews—typically takes one week to one month. I told them I'd have to give Google an answer in one to two days, so they really rushed things for me. The next day, I talked to two Meta hiring managers, and the following morning I received an official verbal offer from Meta.

I was fully mentally prepared to accept the Google offer and reject Meta—I actually had a rejection email drafted to the Meta recruiter! I was so surprised they were able move things along that quickly—the recruiter said my overall interview process was the fastest he's seen in his eleven years at Meta! And I really didn't think they could find an open role for me that matched my interests this well.

I'm joining the Horizon Worlds team to work on their game editor, and to work on the scripting bridge that translates TypeScript logic from the game-world developer into underlying C++ engine logic. I've done bizarrely similar work at Manticore with the Core editor, and this was some of the more enjoyable work I did while at Manticore.

I almost returned to Google

I've been looking for a new job since August 2024. I was only very casually looking at job postings at first, but gradually got more and more serious about it over the last year. But I was getting very little traction!

Also, I've been doing a lot of soul-searching, and I think that I essentially have two options for roles in the games industry: I can do something that I strongly enjoy and make 30%-50% as much money as I need, or I do something that is still game development but isn't quite as fun to work on and make almost 90% as much money as I need. What I really want to do is go back to working on my own game ideas. But that will pay me 0% as much money as I need! So maybe the right answer is to go back to working in big tech, where I'll make 250% as much money as I need. Then I can have more work-life balance, I can slowly work on my personal passion game projects in my free time, and I can someday retire earlier and do whatever I want with my time!

So I told my friend on my old team at Google at the start of April that I wanted to come back! It took a while, but he was eventually able to get the right role lined-up for me back on my old team. Ironically, this period was when I finally had the most luck with other companies wanting to interview me! I had passed the full round of interviews with Meta, Epic Games, and a start-up called Wave by the time I had my official verbal offer from Google. And Google had actually waived the interview process for me entirely, since I had such good ratings when I left and such strong referrals from old teammates (apparently they can waive the interviews for returning Googlers for up to five years after you left!).

In the end, Meta just barely got a verbal offer to me in time, and they found an unexpectedly exciting gameplay-related role for me! So I accepted their offer instead of Google's.

But I feel so bad for abandoning my friends at Google!

😭😭😭

The job hunt

It's rough out there!! (And nearly impossible for entry-level folks)

I started looking for a job in August 2024. My job hunt started off pretty casually, but gradually grew more serious.

I had even more trouble getting traction with applications than I did 2ish years ago. Part of the problem is that I was more picky about the type of role I'd apply for. But part of the problem is that the job market is so awful right now! And game-development jobs have always been relatively hard to get.

Also, I think I had a couple issues with my resume during this time. For reference:

• First, it was too truncated.
• Then, it was too large.
• The final version is much less large (but still 3 full pages!) and has a lot more numbers, albeit pretty hand-wavy numbers.

I did have a lot more responses on my applications near the end, and I suspect this was due in part to me improving my resume.

Some stats:

• I started looking for a new job on August 1st, 2024.
• I accepted an offer on June 26th, 2025.
• I applied to around 150 jobs.
• A lot of these applications were pretty quick via LinkedIn, but consequently, I think those are the applications that got the least responses.
• I received positive responses from dozens of companies.
• I got through the full interview loop with around seven companies.
• I received offers from three companies.

The future

If I had infinite money and could do anything I wanted right now, I'd (A) spend more time with my family, and (B) tinker away on my own game project ideas, which I never expect to be profitable.

Unfortunately, we have bills to pay! So I'll be at Meta for a bit—growing our savings account. Hopefully I'll slowly make some progress on my own game projects in my free time.

In particular, I want to rebuild my Surfacer framework. Surfacer was a big focus of my year-and-a-half sabbatical that ended three years ago. It's a framework for robust pathfinding in 2D platformers. But right now, it's built using Godot's GDScript scripting language (C++ would be a lot more efficient), it only supports an older version of Godot, it's not very user-friendly for other developers, and it doesn't support dynamic and changing levels. I have plans to fix all of these problems, and I've been itching to make progress on them!

Hopefully my new role at Meta is amazing, and I'll be there for at least a few years!

🎉 Cheers!