Then something very strange happened.
A casual interest in games led him to the annual Australian Game Developers Conference in Melbourne, and there he discovered, to his amazement, that not only was there a thriving games development industry hungry for talent, but there are also places you can go to get industry knowledge and experience.
-My mum still doesn't think I am doing the right thing," Boyd concedes. -My wife loves it, and all my mates think it is just the coolest job in the world."
Currently completing his second year of computer game development at the Canberra-based Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE), which trains wannabe developers in computer animation and games design, Boyd is already embarking on his first group-designed game.
-The biggest challenge at this stage is getting all the characters to look the same," Boyd says. -Everybody has such different influences, and we are trying to maintain some consistency."
Founded in 1996, the school became a registered IT training facility in 1999, and currently boasts 169 full time students, with up to 150 enrolled in periodic short courses that are designed to provide an introduction to a certain aspect of games design.
-In effect we deliver people to 3D animation industries, advertising, film, TV, and games development," explains Ian Gibson, head of school at the AIE. -We like to limit the size. We have four classrooms running, so the quality of the teaching is high, and there is a nice atmosphere among the students."
While delivering competent developers into the games industry is the more serious objective of the school, Gibson clearly enjoys working with such highly motivated students.
-We have to literally kick them out at night - tell them to go home or they would stay here 24 hours," Gibson says.
Camilla Carmody is one of the self-confessed games junkies who managed to score a place at the AIE straight after leaving high school.
-I did Web page design in high school, and spent a lot of times building animated gifs, so I knew what I wanted to do," Carmody says. -I was looking into courses that would teach CAD, when I came across this course."
Despite being one out of only two or three girls in the entire course, as well as one of the younger students, Carmody says she settled in quickly because -everyone is just totally obsessed with games".
-There is a lot of competition, and some people have already had a lot of experience when they come into the school, so it can be a bit nerve racking," Carmody says. -But it not like I-have-to-do-better-than-you competition, everybody helps each other quite a lot."
While it seems almost everyone at the AIE is games-mad, there are some exceptions, especially in the more artistic stream. However, what they lack in game addiction, they more than make up for in commitment to art.
Self-taught before coming to the AIE, Shalini Thanapalan had managed to line up some freelance 3D work, although she quickly realised she would need to get some professional training to get very far as a 3D artist, and came across the AIE on the Web.
-Last time I played a game it was Donkey Kong," she admits. -I am into this purely from the artistic side - animation is my first passion."
I've been in the Building Industry all my life, but there is one passion that I have had since the PC was invented, PC Games. Playstation, anything really. Since online games began, I was trying to get onto their beta tester list. I have only succeeded in testing Ultima Online & I think that was only because they wanted to see if anywhere in Australia was marketable with the server equipment they had set up. In the end, it wasn't, their main market was Europe and the lag was incredible, so bad if fact that it eventually became impossible to play. Anyhow, getting back to this topic. Because I run my own business, I don't have much time to attend classes, what I've been looking for, is a programers course that I can do by correspondence. I don't belive I have what it takes to create games yet, but I would like to know what I need to know, to be able to create a game. Not just the ideas and basic ingrediants for a good game, I have them in my head already, I need to know how to technically build, create & produce a PC game. Could you outline the skills needed to actually write,create a game. It would help me out heaps, I would also save a lot of time. I like the idea of the school for game makers too. Keep it up.