Over the past year, while seeking new opportunities, I took the initiative to develop additional skills and expand into several new areas. Much of this effort has been shaped by my location, Alaska. Alaska currently has a very limited game development ecosystem. While there is interest and potential, the local talent pool remains small. The example most often cited is Never Alone; however, even that project was developed outside the state, in Seattle. Despite being considered a neighboring city, Seattle is still a four-hour flight away.
At the beginning of last year, I set out to pick up some new skills in ArcGIS. At first, it seemed like a viable direction, but after investing a few hundred dollars, it quickly fizzled out. Most of the work was focused on 2D data, and opportunities in Alaska turned out to be pretty limited. Depending on how you ask the AI models, they’ll either paint a very optimistic picture of the industry or make it sound like a complete dead end. That seems to be true for just about any topic. It really depends on the narrative you’re looking for.
That’s when I realized Revit had far more practical opportunities in Alaska, so I started ramping up in that direction. Currently, I’m building several as-built models. The first is my childhood home, where we want to do some renovations. I need reasonably accurate area calculations so we can figure out how much flooring, carpet, tile, sheetrock, and other materials to purchase. But this is mostly for learning Revit.
The second project is an Orthodox church that has been under construction but has stalled. I have the original blueprints, but some of the construction has already deviated from them. For practice, I’ve been working on an as-built model of the structure. It includes some interesting architectural features like domes, arches, barrel vaults, and onion domes, which has given me a good opportunity to work with Revit massing tools and custom families, especially for the windows.
The third project is a house my wife is interested in building on newly acquired property, along with a tiny home. Through this project, I’ve learned a lot about creating custom families, decks, stairs, linked files, profiles, patterns, materials, and setting up multi-disciplinary templates. Udemy has been a big help in this area.
While ramping up on Revit, I’ve also been staying active in Unreal Engine and keeping my skills sharp, mostly working on Linux. The goal is to build or adapt scripts that can send Revit 3D models, along with materials, directly into Unreal for visualization and pre-viz work.
Unfortunately, Revit doesn’t run on Linux. I made a half-hearted attempt a while back to get it working, but eventually gave up. I could potentially explore BricsCAD, which does run on Linux. I also tried the Bonsai BIM add-on for Blender while modeling a small house, but Blender started to struggle pretty quickly. FreeCAD was the same for BIM workflow. I also tried compiling FreeCAD but I got stuck on one of the important libs where I gave up.
On the other hand, Revit runs surprisingly well on my old 2010 laptop. Obviously, it’s not ideal for large projects, but for training and smaller as-built models, it works sluggishly, but acceptable.
As for the Revit-to-Unreal pipeline, I’ve been spending time exploring Datasmith and how it fits into that workflow and coding my own C# exporter for training purposes.
I also enjoy working with my hands, so I took on a few practical projects of my own:
This past year has been a mix of persistence, adaptation, and tempered expectations. Living in Alaska continues to shape both the opportunities available and the directions I choose to pursue. With limited prospects in game development locally, I focused on building practical, transferable skills rather than waiting for ideal conditions to appear.
Experimenting with ArcGIS clarified its limitations in this context, which led me toward Revit as a more grounded and useful path. Through hands-on projects ranging from personal renovations to complex religious architecture, I’ve been steadily developing technical confidence while staying connected to real-world needs. At the same time, I’ve maintained my connection to Unreal Engine, exploring ways to bridge BIM workflows into visualization despite platform and tooling constraints.
Alongside digital work, physical projects and construction have provided balance and a sense of tangible progress. Overall, the year has left me with mixed feelings. Moving forward I’m not expecting much from the year ahead, but I’m still hoping it will bring something better.