Knight of Twilight

Rejoice Diepreye

February 07, 2026.

This was the day my life took a complete turn for the best.

My name is Rejoice Diepreye and I'm a twenty one year old programmer, I am from Nigeria in Africa.

A tall and slim youth standing almost 6ft tall, like most Africans, I have dark skin and black eyes.

At the age of 21 most Nigerian youths would either be in the university or were already graduates. Not me tho, i currently work at a supermarket that is twenty minutes away from my house, where I live with my family.

I have two siblings , a younger sister and a boy younger than her. I have a very hardworking father and a mother who shared in this trait, working hard was in our genes in my family. Except for me tho, I hate stress at all levels, some could even say I was a lazy person.

My younger sister Aye is in college at the age of eighteen where our last sibling will be joining her in a year.

Now you might wonder why I wasn't in the college yet since i was older, the truth is just that I didn't want to attend college for personal reasons. I mean ,what's the use of a certificate if your never gonna use it anyways?. Would be better to just learn a digital skill and that's exactly what I did.

While still working at the supermarket I had been learning to code in order to become a programmer. The pros of digital skills far outweighed the cons, or so it seemed to me.

I mean I could work for any company or institute anywhere in the world and I could do it from the comfort of my home,not to talk of the annual income and job availability. Now I know you're saying I could go to college and still get this, but I don't really care. I don't wanna have to memorize four textbooks preparing for a test.

So it's Monday and I'm at work as usual, since I'm not a salesperson I'm just chilling behind the tablet soap shelf. In Nigeria we called most washing soaps tablet soaps, because they had a similar rectangular shape.

With the soap shelf in front of me and the toothbrush shelf behind, it was a pretty sweet place to hide and study or just sleep, I'm not saying I sleep at work tho.... Ahem...

So I'm sitting on a plastic chair with my laptop in front, it's resting on two packs of notebooks which I stacked on top of each other as a makeshift table.

I'm staring at my project on Godot and I'm smiling to myself in satisfaction.

The main reason I loved coding was something I didn't tell most people, but it's was actually quite simple.

Video games.

I loved video games.

Personally,they were the coolest things mankind ever made till date. Now hear me out before you start listing things that are actually helpful to society and what not.

What most people never realized was that majority of video gamers didn't play games because they were bored, no it was tool to escape reality or become something that Is deemed impossible in real life. And I too was one of those wierdos.

I was born with an overactive imagination so whenever I played a game, I always felt like I was living a different life altogether.

I could feel the rush of adrenaline and excitement as if I were the very character on my screen. The feeling can only be described as otherworldly, literally.

The downside tho was that I could never really be satisfied by any of the countless games I had played. They weren't bad per se ,but I always felt like there was something missing. like it could be always be better.

Unfortunately, I never found that perfect game no matter where I looked. A lot of games came close but ultimately fell short, it was then I decided to take matters into my own hand. Why wait to play the perfect game when I could make it myself.

And so I went into game development, of course I had to grasp the basics first. I found an app called freecodecamp which gave courses for different levels of programming, and most of the content could be gotten for free.

It was a rough journey for the first few weeks given that I had no prior knowledge of programming despite how digital the world was at the time.

Over time I just got better and more confident and everything started to make more sense to me. While still going through classess on programming to become a full stack developer, I came across a game engine called Godot.

Godot is what really made my dream into reality. It was an engine that was used to make games, the best part was that you could do it even as a complete noob. It was of the most beginner friendly game engines out there.

After digging around and finding out, through tutorial videos online, I was finally ready to make my dream game.

The game I made was called Rebirth online, it was a survival game but it was much deeper than that.

The players find themselves stranded on a chain of islands after a shipwreck, the island is a mysterious one at an uncharted part of the earth.

The players had to explore and conquer the island piece by piece, the problem tho was the player was basically too weak to do that .There were so many powerfull beasts and tribes inhabiting the realm beyond this island already.

With a weak constitution and threat of annihilation, the player and other survivors have no choice but to evolve by any means possible.

What really made my game so different from all the rest then?

Well the most important aspect is what I call the (destiny engine). This was something that I integrated into my game with Ai (artificial intelligence), and also the most difficult thing to build in my game.

What does this cool sounding feature actually do? you may ask.

Well let's talk about it.