MY STEAM PROFILE

I joined Steam on September 24th, 2019 — and for a long time, my profile looked exactly like everyone else's. Default layout, nothing to look at, nothing that said anything about who I was or what I cared about. It was functional, and that was about the best thing you could say about it.

That bothered me more than it probably should have. Steam profiles are a space you inhabit — a small corner of the internet that represents you to every person who clicks on your name. I wanted mine to actually mean something. I wanted it to feel like it belonged to someone specific, not just anyone.

The decision to centre the profile around Leon S. Kennedy wasn't a difficult one. Leon has been my favourite character in gaming since Resident Evil 2 — the original, not just the remake. There's something about him that has always resonated: the dry humour under pressure, the stubborn refusal to give up, the way he keeps showing up to situations that would break most people and somehow comes out the other side.

Resident Evil as a franchise has been a constant in my life for years. The lore, the characters, the atmosphere — it's the kind of series that rewards the people who pay attention to it. Building a profile around Leon felt like the right way to represent that. Not just as a fan, but as someone who genuinely cares about the world those games built.

I am deeply into graphic design, and the Steam profile became one of the most involved personal projects I've taken on. Every piece of artwork, every illustration, every rendering on the profile is my own work — nothing sourced, nothing borrowed. That was important to me from the start. If it was going to represent me, it needed to actually be made by me.

Getting it right took just over a year. Not because the tools were difficult, but because I refused to settle. Every element went through multiple versions. Layouts were rebuilt from scratch when they weren't quite working. Colour grades were adjusted until they felt correct. I have over 8,500 images on the profile at this point — a number that sounds excessive until you understand that every single one of them was placed with intention.

I am, by my own admission, obsessed with everything looking perfect. That's not an exaggeration. If something is slightly off — a margin, a tone, an alignment — I will notice it and I will fix it. The profile reflects that. It is the most detailed thing I've built for myself, and I'm genuinely proud of how it turned out.

The profile currently sits at level 150, placing it in the top 70 ranked profiles in Ireland by level. That ranking is a side effect of the time invested rather than a goal in itself — but it's a reasonable measure of how seriously I take the platform.

It's a living project. Things get updated, refined, occasionally rebuilt when I feel like a section has stopped working. It will probably never be truly finished, and I'm fine with that. The best version of it is always the next one.