Introductions
26/10/2025
Hi there, welcome to my website! It's currently a work in progress. In fact, as of writing this, 90% of the website isn't even public yet. I thought it would be good to launch the website with a couple blog posts ready to go, so I decided to take this opportunity to introduce myself. So let me answer some questions!
Who am I?
My name is Nazar Elsayed, I'm a 27-year-old software developer, game developer, and aspiring artist. I graduated from the Game Software Engineering course at Bournemouth University in 2020 and have since been working as a software engineer on a pretty wide variety of projects. I've worked as a Unity Developer making games and AR tech, I've built apps for Android and iOS, and I'm currently working on a host of other interesting projects.
But work isn't my whole life, I also have a lot of hobbies that I really enjoy and would like to share with you. That's actually part of the reason I wanted to start this blog in the first place. As I mentioned before, I'm an aspiring artist and game developer, but I also play music, I do archery, and I travel a lot to compete in fighting game tournaments. So I hope to share some of my progress and adventures with you here on this blog.
Why make a website?
It's currently 2025, and off the back of the COVID pandemic, the job market has been pretty rough in the game development industry. From 2021 to 2024 there has been over 30,000 layoffs in the game industry, and the number only seems to be continuing to climb. Needless to say, the job market for positions in the game industry is incredibly competitive right now. I needed a way to stand out from the crowd of veteran triple A developers and the endless horizons of budding young talents. I'm a developer by trade, but I've always considered myself more of a creative than an academic. I wanted to create a portfolio that not only shows off my work, but one that also gives people a window into my life and who I am.
So I made a website—from scratch! This website is built using Next.js and fully incorporates a modern website development pipeline. I had little to no knowledge about how to build a website before this apart from some basic HTML and CSS I learned in school 100 years ago. This website is not just a place to show off my work and hobbies, it was a challenge to myself to push my boundaries, learn new skills, and use them to solve a real problem. It was a lot to learn. Just in building this website I've had to learn about domains, hosts, registrars, SSL, HTTPS, DNS, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, JSX, React, Next.js, JSON, XML, Tailwind, UI theory—I could go on, perhaps I'll make a post about that. It took a bit longer than I expected, but when you've worked in software development for a while, you know all too well that's usually how it goes.
Beyond professional reasons to have a website, I wanted a way to document my hobbies and my life outside work. I tend to dabble in a lot of interests. I'm a firm believer that building a diverse skillset is as essential to mastering any individual skill as well... working on the skill itself. Trying to keep up with work, art, music, tournaments, and whatever other interest I happen to pick up that week—it's easy to get overwhelmed. I often feel like while working on any one hobby that I'm falling behind on all the others. Time drawing could be spent working on a GitHub project; time preparing for a tournament could be spent updating my portfolio. But with a website and a blog, every step I make on my journey can be unified into a single project. Each new post, another building block in creating this, my own little corner of the internet.
What now?
Well, once this website is up and running properly, it will hopefully free up time for me to get back to pursuing a lot of my hobbies. I put a lot of things on hold to focus on this and get it done, so I'm looking forward to getting back to them. This year I "enrolled" in a sort of do-at-home 3-year art course, created by the amazing Marc Brunet. It's focussed on teaching everything you'd need to know to land a job as a professional artist working in the game or film industries. I'm really excited to get back to it and be able to share my progress and what I learn with you. Anyway, I think I've babbled on enough for an introductory post, I'm looking forward to sharing many stories with you!
-Naz