This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Last night I was at BCN Gamedev Society, a monthly meetup for game developers in Barcelona. I spoke to a lot of people and caught up with old friends. I also got to chat with several juniors who want to break into the industry — concept artists and game designers. All of them dealing with the same problem: how do you get experience when nobody will hire you because you don’t have experience?
It’s not a new question. But today the answer looks very different from what it did ten years ago.
The code is being rewritten
I read a LinkedIn post that got me thinking. The core idea was this: money has always been the code society uses to translate human time into something its systems can read.
- You have a skill → it becomes a salary.
- You have a need → it becomes a price.
- You have a future → it becomes credit.
The trouble is that money is a low-resolution system. It can measure output, not meaning. It can reward production, not direction.
And now AI is dismantling exactly that promise: if generating asset variants, doing QA on repetitive scenarios, or brokering information between teams are all things machines do better — what’s left for the junior who was learning by doing precisely those things?
The actual problem
Let’s take a concrete example. A junior concept artist wants to break into the industry. They’ve studied, they have a decent portfolio. But a studio will often choose a senior who, with ComfyUI and well-crafted prompts, produces in under a day what the junior would take a week to deliver.
You build experience by doing things — but if the entry-level work gets automated, where do you actually learn? How do you learn by osmosis in this new reality?
Survival tips
Here are some concrete ideas.
1. Stop competing where AI wins.
AI wins on production speed, consistency, and infinite variation. It doesn’t win on taste, art direction, or the intuition for what will land with that player, in that cultural context, with that emotional tone.
If your portfolio says “I can write a GDD quickly”, you’re on the wrong turf. If it says “I know how to choose, curate, direct, and explain why a decision works”, you’re in a much better position, in my view.
2. Ship small things, made with other people.
A junior game designer with five small games on itch.io, all made as part of a team, is worth more than someone with a portfolio full of unrealised concepts. What you’ve shipped shows you’ve been through the full cycle: idea → prototype → feedback → release.
That’s real experience, in a team context. And it doesn’t require anyone to hire you first.
- Game jams to work directly with other people
- Personal projects you then put in front of players and take notes on how they actually behave
- Weekend experiments you publish on a public Discord to collect feedback
The goal is to build a track record of decisions made in response to real interactions — and real player behaviour you’ve observed yourself.
3. Look for a senior to work alongside, not a junior position.
The “senior + AI” dynamic that’s becoming the norm paradoxically creates room for informal collaborations. A senior with too much on their plate and too few reliable juniors is often open to accepting help in exchange for a small financial arrangement and some mentorship. It’s not ideal, but it’s how things work. And when you’re around someone with experience and judgement, you learn by osmosis. That’s always been true.
BCN Gamedev Society, online communities, indie studio Discords — those are the places where those conversations happen.
4. Use AI to develop your taste.
The trap for juniors is using AI to produce more stuff, and ending up just producing more mediocrity, faster.
- Generate 50 variants with AI.
- Then pick one.
- Know why you picked it.
- Then iterate.
Your ability to judge — what to keep, what to cut, and why — is the one thing that won’t be automated any time soon.
5. Short-term survival is a separate problem.
I’m not going to tell you universal basic income is just around the corner and everything will be fine. Maybe it arrives, maybe it doesn’t. In the meantime, there are bills to pay.
Some concrete options for keeping the lights on while you build your track record:
– Gamification freelance work for clients outside the industry (startups, corporate training, educational)
– Content creation: if you can explain game design in an interesting way, there’s an audience for it
– Tutoring, online courses, local workshops
– UX writing, product design, narrative design for non-game clients
None of these are the career you want, but they’re bridges.
Conclusion
The experience paradox isn’t new, but it’s getting sharper. And the answer is to build real experience in unconventional ways:
- make small things and use them as a way to connect with others
- stay close to people who know more than you
- develop taste, and learn to communicate it.
Money measures what the system can already read. What systems can’t read yet is taste. Intuition. A sense of what’s actually worth making.
For now, that’s still our territory.