Who Is LevTheDev?

It starts with a folding chair.

I was ten years old, sitting next to my dad while he played World of Warcraft. I didn't have my own account, didn't have a character. I just watched. For months, that was enough. Then one day he let me roll a character on his account, and that was it. Something clicked. For the first time, I felt like I was in control of something, and I was hooked.

A year or two later, YouTube was picking up steam alongside a niche little game called Minecraft. I started watching creators like CaptainSparklez, EthosLab, Paulsoaresjr, davidangel64, SethBling. These guys were building worlds, making stuff, and people were watching. I needed this game so badly that I cracked a beta version to run on my Windows XP machine with 4GB of RAM. I was getting maybe 30 frames per second. I did not care. It was the first game I had ever played that had no real objective. Just play. That kind of freedom was new to me, and it stuck.

Gaming became central to everything. Most of my friendships started online. The real ones, the lasting ones. Servers, lobbies, Discord calls at 2am. That's not unusual if you're around my age. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

But somewhere along the way, things shifted. I'm turning 26 this month. I play a lot less than I used to. I talk to those guys less. Life has responsibilities now, and when I actually have free time, I'd rather spend it building something than sitting inside someone else's. The instinct that made me love games never went away. I just started pointing it at different things.

I've been writing code since I was fourteen or fifteen. My high school offered an intro to Java course. I took it, then transitioned into a vocational IT program that let me go deeper. From there, a Computer Science degree from Ohio University. These days I work as a Software Engineer at Sherwin-Williams. It's my third professional engineering role, building full-stack applications. It's good work. I've learned a lot, and at this point in my career I feel like I've been around long enough to see how these systems actually get built in the real world, not just in textbooks.

That experience gave me a certain kind of confidence I didn't have before. Confidence to stop planning and start shipping.

The project I'm building right now is a standalone multiplayer game inspired by Annihilation, a Minecraft minigame from a server called Shotbow that I spent an unreasonable amount of my teenage years playing. Shotbow still exists and actively maintains Annihilation as a Minecraft minigame to this day. I'm entirely unaffiliated with Shotbow. What I'm building is my own rendition of their original game mode as a standalone platform. I genuinely believe the concept is one of the most compelling multiplayer ideas ever made. It just never had a real stage. A standalone game, built right and marketed properly, could be something huge. I'm betting on that.

What I didn't fully appreciate going in was how much of game development isn't the game at all. Deployment. Server infrastructure. Release pipelines. Systems that most indie devs outsource or paper over until they become real problems. I decided I wanted to own as much of this stack as possible. Lean costs, full control, nothing I don't understand. So before a single player logs in, I've been building the foundation.

Why start LevTheDev now? Honestly, a few things converged.

My career has picked up. I'm at a point where I can actually invest in building this out, not just in time, but financially. I've tried doing content before, mostly around gaming, and I burned out. I don't want that here. What's different this time is that the project actually has stakes. I formed a real LLC. I'm spending real money on infrastructure to learn how it works. AI tools have dramatically accelerated how fast I can move, not because they do the thinking, but because they help me access information fast enough to stay in flow, though I've learned to question everything they say. They're confident and wrong more often than you'd like.

But the biggest thing is this: I think what I'm figuring out might actually be useful to other people. There are developers out there who code for a living, who have a game or a project they can't stop thinking about, and who are hitting the same walls I'm hitting. I want to show my work. Not as someone who has it figured out, but as someone a few steps into the same road.

LevTheDev is where I document all of it. The game. The infrastructure. The decisions, the mistakes, and the things I eventually figure out. It won't be beginner tutorials. It will be an honest look at what it takes to build something real, with real constraints, from someone who has a day job, a vision, and not a lot of patience for wasted time.

If that sounds like something you'd want to follow along with, welcome.