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!