Chapter 1: From Montreal to Tokyo

It started in the summer of 2016. I landed in Montreal to begin the last two years of my double-degree program — UTBM in France paired with ETS in Montreal — and I had no idea I was about to fall in love with the city.

Montreal turned out to be one of those places that just fits. Dynamic, diverse, full of people from everywhere. As a French guy, life there was almost embarrassingly easy. The winters were long — months of cold that would scare a lot of people off — but I liked them. There's something quietly perfect about being warm at home, snow piling up outside, working on a side project past midnight with no reason to be anywhere else.

I was studying computer software, and I knew what I wanted: games. Not "games" in the abstract — I wanted to make them, ship them, hand a controller to someone and watch them play something I'd built. So I joined the video game club at ETS and threw myself at every gamejam I could find. Six, maybe seven weekends across those two years — entire weekends of no sleep, junk food, and that very specific shipping-or-dying feeling at 4am when the build still won't compile.

I made a lot of small games. A quiz game. A Mario-style platformer. A stealth game where you had to sneak from A to B around the cones of security-guard flashlights — I still think the look of that one held up. There was a tetris-on-a-sphere game where asteroids fell toward the earth and you had to rotate the planet to slot them in. Most of them are lost now — I have no idea where those project files ended up, and that's probably my biggest regret from that period. Years of weekends, gone.

The one I'm proudest of, though, I remember clearly. I built it with Julien and Abdelhadi — two of my best friends, who happened to be studying in Montreal at the same time. A tetris game with proper sound design and visual effects, the kind of thing where you finish a polish pass and step back and think, yeah, that's a real game. The first couple of jams I was finding my footing, but after a while something clicked: if I didn't know how to do something, I'd just figure it out. By the end I genuinely believed I could build any kind of game I wanted.

That mindset bled into the rest of school. I spent hours and hours in the library — the school library, the municipal one too, which had this dark study room I loved for some reason. The atmosphere was perfect. I'd come out of a six-hour session blinking at the sun. My grades were good — top of class a few times, which I know doesn't really mean anything in terms of skill, but as someone who's shy and introverted by nature, the validation meant something. I'd actually come to Montreal partly to push against that shyness. Being on the football team, working with all kinds of people in the game club, leading project teams — none of it came naturally to me, but I found I didn't dislike people. I just had to keep showing up.

In October 2017, I started my master's internship at Summit Tech, a telecoms company. The brief: build a VR game prototype in Unity that would use their internal video-call APIs, so they could demo it to clients alongside the telecoms platform another team was building. Four months. I had a fantastic designer alongside me, and we shipped. Real demo, real product. My first taste of building software inside a real company and it felt good.

Then the curveball.

My French university required one more internship — another six months — before they'd let me graduate. I was set on staying in Montreal. I'd settled in, I had a network, I was already getting calls from video game studios, interviews lined up. The plan wrote itself: finish a second internship here, graduate, stay.

And then I was scrolling Facebook — Facebook — and a job ad slid into my feed. A small company in Japan looking for a web developer. Japan. The country I'd been quietly obsessed with for years. The country I'd been studying kanji for every single day on WaniKani, with no real reason, no concrete plan to ever go.

The catch: it wasn't games. It was web. And the pay was ¥100,000 a month — which after my Summit Tech paychecks (Canadian internship salary, paid every two weeks, I'd felt almost rich) was a genuine pay cut. But I sent an email anyway, asking if they'd consider me as an intern. I expected nothing.

One interview. Jordy, the CEO. He said yes.

I sat with that for about as long as it took me to read the email. Japan. The country I'd been pointing at without knowing it. Years of kanji study suddenly looked less like a hobby and more like preparation. There was no real doubt — I'd been raised on the idea that hard work pays off, and if there was ever a moment to listen to my heart instead of my spreadsheet, this was it.

So I said yes. Goodbye Canada, hello Japan.

Looking back from May 2026, with the yen weaker than it's ever been in my time here — financially it wasn't the smartest decision I ever made. But you can't have everything in life. And I'd take that version of me, the one who clicked apply on a random Facebook ad, every time.

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Achievements

A more concrete record of what I built and shipped during the Montreal years:

• Pursued an engineering double degree between UTBM (France) and ÉTS (Montreal) in computer/software engineering, finishing top of the class in several courses.
• Shipped six or seven games at weekend gamejams — a quiz game, a Mario-style platformer, a stealth game built around guards' flashlight cones, and a Tetris-on-a-sphere — culminating in a polished Tetris with proper sound design and visual effects.
• Won ÉTS's Student Engagement Recognition (2016–2017, Science & Technology) for consistent, active involvement in the Conjure ETS video-game development club — including representing the school at game-dev events.
• Built a VR game prototype at Summit Tech during my master's internship, integrating the company's internal video-call APIs in Unity and delivering it as a client-facing demo alongside their telecoms platform.
• Pushed myself out of my comfort zone — joining the football team and leading project teams in the game club — turning a shy, introverted default into a habit of just showing up.