I was the kid who wondered how the game worked.

Most kids play the level. I wanted to know what the game was doing while I played it — where the enemies decided to turn, why the jump felt right, what was happening a layer beneath the picture.

I'm Esmayl Mourad, and I've been chasing that question ever since.

Wanting to make games was never the hard part. Getting to it was. It took until 2012 to find a school that taught game development, in a city a long way from my home town. I went. That's where Unity and C# stopped being words I'd read about and became the things I worked in every day.

In my third year I interned at Gemeente Leeuwarden, where three other students and I built a virtual version of the city — the real streets, for the municipality that runs them. Grendel Games walked us through the development cycles, and for the first time I sat across from the client instead of hearing about them second-hand. That was the moment running my own studio stopped being a daydream and started looking like a plan.

Jellyfish Designed Me is that plan, still under construction. I build small games solo, and just as often the tools that make the next one faster to build — because the part I loved as a kid turned out to be the part underneath.

If you're hiring, building something, or just want to compare notes on how games get made, I'd like to hear from you: [email protected]. My code is on GitHub.