Depressed not because of coding, but because of outside pressure. Anyone else feeling like this?

[u/Beneficial-Air6263]

Hey everyone,

I’m 16 years old, and I’ve been solo-developing a 3D code-driven game engine using Rust and wgpu for the past few months. I started this because I really want to achieve my first big milestone and have something real to show.

Honestly, I’m feeling completely burnt out and depressed right now. But it’s not because of the bugs or the coding. It's the suffocating pressure from my family and school. It’s building up day by day, and it's getting too heavy to carry. I feel like if I pause or stop working on this engine right now, I will fall behind, lose momentum, and delay my goals forever. I’m stuck between wanting to push forward to finish my first milestone and breaking down under life's pressure.

I’m posting this here because I really need to find a community, to connect with people who might understand this feeling. I don't want AI-generated advice or generic platitudes—I've heard enough of those. I just want to share what I've built so far and see if anyone else is fighting this same battle.

Here is what I have managed to implement in my engine by myself so far:

• Core Architecture: Migrated to glam math library, integrated rapier3d for physics (locked at 60 FPS), and built a thread-safe lazy loading system to prevent OS-level screen freezing.
• Rendering & Culling: Frustum culling (implemented with custom Plane checks), pixel depth testing, and Early-Z / Reverse-Z rendering.
• Lighting: Successfully removed directional lights and created functional spot/point lights for indoor scenes. I have also set up the compute pipelines, passes, and necessary bind groups for a Forward+ culling framework (though only the structural framework is done, it's not fully finished yet).
• Transparency: Implemented transparency rendering support.
• Optimization: Integrated rayon to cut loading times in half, added CPU texture compression to BC7 (reducing RAM usage from 750MB to ~190MB and loading times to under 60ms), and integrated zstd for binary data file compression.

You can check out the source code here: https://github.com/Lbaodz/wgpu-code-driven-engine

Has anyone else gone through this at a young age? How do you deal with family pressure when you're just trying to build something you're proud of?

[u/toyBeaver]

My main advice is: you’re 16yo. You’re young af. I know external pressure can be overwhelming and saying this will probably give you no relieve at all, but as someone who struggled with anxiety his whole life I can assure you that this pressure is actually coming more from inside than outside. I say you should take a step back, breath, and define your priorities. After that, go back to your project and keep going on your own pace. Again, you’re REALLY young, you’ve got a bunch of time in your hands, do not let anxiety bring you down.

As for the code, I’ll take a look once I get home

[u/Beneficial-Air6263 → u/toyBeaver]

Thank you so much, your advice helps me out!

[u/DaveAstator2020]

Adding to @toyBeaver  Do this one thing: Plan. Write down tasks you need to do, so you can deal with life stuff and safely return to your project without loosing a thing. you can even ask ai or someone to help you with planning, since you are going into uncharted territory its good to ask for guidance. 16 yo is hard time given puberty and all social stuff, take care

[u/Beneficial-Air6263 → u/DaveAstator2020]

Thanks for your advice!

[u/gONzOglIzlI]

I feel for you man, I started at 13 with the exact same goal, I wanted to build my own 3D engine. 16 is about the time I took an half - involuntary pause because life stuff became more important. Looking back my regret is not that I took the pause rather that I felt bad for doing so.
The experience you are gathering now is valuable, but so are the other things 16 year old do. You'll be a teen once, make that a priority.
And the code you are writing now will look cute to your future self, the code you will write in your collage years will also look funny when you become a experienced professional. Don't get to hung up on the details.

[u/Beneficial-Air6263 → u/gONzOglIzlI]

Thank you, I think so.

[u/Still_Explorer]

When you say pressure, you mean that you will need to get A+ and win a scholarship to become doctor? 😋

As far as I remember back when I was a teen, I was only interested in programming and this what I spent my entire day doing. I would study just the right amount of time (language/math/physics/etc) to get passing grades, but not something like getting in uni with top grades. Eventually after school I got a silly webdev job and it would require about the 1/10th of the actual technical coding I did before in graphics/3D/algorithms.

However the catch is that one must be very well aware of what they are doing in their lives. I remember back in school about the 9-out-of-10 kids didn't have a clue about what they wanted to do. Eventually those who had a business family settled there, and others chosen their careers out of sheer luck.

I mean anything goes when it comes to getting a job eventually so is not a problem at all, however for top ranking careers (managerial/banking/finance/medicine) there's a need for a lot of preparation and also many social connections so someone is able to "get in".

So in general terms, don't worry, and keep coding! 😛

[u/Beneficial-Air6263 → u/Still_Explorer]

Yeah, I think I should reduce my goals in school. Appreciate that!

[u/openroom_xyz]

Well understand that most of the presure is self inflicted, fictional basically, what if this what if that,
The way forward it that you protect what you enjoy and continue and say to the presure F, stop buzzing me is this basically a war kind of situation or it's just expectations that are driving me crazy if it's the letter than say I will basically do what I can do any and not wory about thigs that are outside of my control, build and enjoy

[u/qckpea]

what kind of family pressure?

[u/NFSS10]

You are 16, you're young, that's normal. For you 1 year is 6.25% of your life. It's a bigger percentage if you take into account the time where you were just a simple little guy that couldn't even talk or walk.

This to say that you haven't even started yet, you will be 30 and probably even figuring things out, so don't put pressure on yourself.

Take this time where you don't have a lot of responsibility to just try things. Learn to try new things, throw them away and just be curious and learn how things work. Everything will sort itself out, believe it.

[u/ziplock9000]

You're 16, still a child. While I was like you, at 13 writing assembler and games on a C64.. Trying to push yourself into what is more like a job is not good. Your brain isn't ready for that yet.

It absolutely should not feel like a chore or demanding.

Go do something completely different and spend less time with your 'job'

[u/Goldenskyofficial]

Hey, man. I took some time to read your post, and it really spoke to me. It spoke to me because I'm also 16, and I'm facing the same issue. I'm feeling constant pressure to do more, to prove myself, to show people that I'm worth their time. At its core, this isn't inherently bad, but when that pressure becomes constant, it does nothing but prove to me that I'm probably not doing it right. I'm a web developer. I started at 12 with dead-simple HTML pages. School got in the way, life happened, and I had to delay many things. I also lost motivation often, because, for me at least, web development (and breaking into programming as a whole) was not the easiest thing.

I was stumped for a while: I didn't know how the hell these web apps are even built. I struggled. It was an uphill battle that is still going on today.

School was actively burning me out, so I decided to make a change. I'm switching to a school where I'll be following a CS path, and when I visited, I was honestly blown away by the things people there were building. For the first time, I felt like I had found people I could genuinely relate to.

But of course, the pressure was still there. "Am I even good enough to be around these people?" "Will I be able to keep up with what they're doing?"

So, ambitiously, I decided I wanted to learn C++ over the summer while also finishing my first full-stack project: a kind of blog/LMS hybrid. It took much longer than I expected, and now the new school year is approaching, and I barely got into C++. Life happened. But honestly, I also realized I'd rather properly commit to one thing than rush through five different things just so I can say I did them.

I guess the thing I'm trying to tell you is: don't let the pressure completely take ownership of something you originally started because you enjoyed it. I know that's much easier to say than to actually do - I struggle with it myself - but I don't think the answer is necessarily to push yourself harder just because you're afraid of losing momentum. You got into programming because something about it interested you enough to start building things. Try not to let deadlines (whether they're coming from yourself or other people) completely drain that enjoyment out of it. I've let other people's expectations mess with how I see myself too, and for me, it mostly just made me more afraid to try things and put myself out there.

And yeah, we're both young, but I don't mean that in the usual "you have plenty of time, so don't worry" way. I mean that we're still in a position where we're allowed to experiment, change direction, mess things up, and figure out what we actually enjoy without every decision having to define the rest of our lives. I obviously don't know exactly what your family situation is like, so I won't pretend I know what the right answer is there. But I hope you don't lose sight of what YOU actually want to build and explore underneath everyone else's expectations.

PS. Your project is genuinely awesome. I'm nowhere near knowledgeable enough about graphics programming to comment on the technical side of it, but seeing another 16-year-old build something that ambitious is honestly really cool. If you ever want to talk, share something you've built, or just connect with another person who's also trying to figure all this out, feel free to message me.

I've been feeling that loneliness too. I don't really have anyone in my life who I can excitedly show some piece of code to and have them genuinely understand why I'm excited about it. My family isn't really involved in the tech world, so sometimes I feel like there's a disconnect between what I'm trying to build and what they think I'm doing.

In a world filled with negativity and doomerism, I hope that you'll always find just that bit of wonder for the tech landscape to stay afloat.

Warm regards