Hello
I’m Ridham Saini. I am a software developer currently completing my masters in Advanced Computer Science at Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Before starting my Masters, I spent about a year and a half at a Game Studio as an Intern and later as a full time Game Programmer. This was my first professional software experience, straight after my Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Engineering. Eventually, though, I made a slightly difficult decision to leave and return to university. I felt like there was still a lot I did not know and a lot more to explore in CS than what I had encountered through game development alone.
I still enjoy making games, spending my breaks working on small experiments, but I don’t see myself as only a game developer anymore. What has become clear to me is less which field I belong to and more about the kind of work I enjoy and how I like to work on problems. I’m at my best when I start with something unclear, work out what actually needs solving, get rough version working and then gradually shaping it into something more deliberate.
For now, I’m finishing my dissertation and looking for my next full-time role.
A Few Other Things
I moved to the UK in 2025, and live in Newcastle upon Tyne and let me tell you something, there is nothing an evening walk along the Tyne can’t fix.
I grew up in India, specifically I am from Punjab, yeah… I’m a Punjabi :)
I spend a lot of time in front of my computer, though not all of it is particularly productive. Outside university, I’m usually:
- playing something - currently The Witcher 3
- hanging out on Discord
- endlessly tweaking this website (took me 2 weeks to set this up)
- listening to music - lately a lot of Undyed, especially Orioles Fly South and Show Me How
My Journey
2022 - Game Programmer
GoLive Games, Hyderabad
I joined GoLive Games as an intern shortly before finishing my Bachelor’s and later moved into a full-time role. I worked mainly in Unity and C#, building gameplay systems around locomotion, shooting, quests, and other core mechanics.
I also worked on collaborative projects with external teams. That included a card game with the Facebook Gaming team, where I integrated Facebook APIs and worked on gameplay and event systems using an MVC architecture, as well as another studio project where I became the programmer from our team they worked with directly.
2024 - Indie Dev
Easy Breezy Drive, Released on Steam
I built Easy Breezy Drive while learning Unreal Engine and C++, and used it as a reason to go beyond the basics and understand how larger projects are usually structured.
The project uses systems such as CommonUI, Custom World Streaming, Gameplay Ability System, and patterns inspired by Epic’s Lyra architecture, including a custom experience-based initialization flow for setting up gameplay and project state.
Eventually, I took it all the way through to a Steam release.
2025 - Back to University
MSc Advanced Computer Science, Northumbria University
The Master’s gave me the chance to work across areas I knew little about before.
Since then, my work has taken me through databases, big data, cloud computing, machine learning, HCI for Social Change, research projects and plenty of software engineering disciplines in between.
2026 - Team Lead (Advanced Practice Semester)
Northumbria University, Newcastle
Led a team of four on a client project for an equestrian business looking to expand its digital presence nationwide over 2 years.
The brief was intentionally open-ended, so much of the early work involved understanding the client’s goals, constraints, and priorities before deciding what we should actually deliver.
The client was very happy with the final work and told us we had gone beyond what they expected from the project.