Tag: howto

The interviewer just asked you: “Tell me about a game project you’re proud of, and why.“

You may hear a casual request for a portfolio highlight, but what the hiring manager, especially a leader, is listening for is impact. They want to know what behavior you changed, and what value that behavior drove.

As game designers, we often fall into the trap of talking purely about mechanics or systems: “I designed a beautiful, highly iterative combat loop” or “We built a seamless crafting system.”

But that misses the crucial connection. The best answers connect various layers of validation, proving that your design decisions were not just creative, but strategically effective.

Three Layers of Impact

To succeed as a senior designer, your answer must connect the micro (player behavior/action) to the macro (company value).

Layer 1: The Behavioral Change (The Micro)	Layer 2: The Game Metric (The System Validation)	Layer 3: The Instinct & Business Goal (The Value)
How did the player react? (e.g., Rage quitting on a particular level, persistent use of an unintended social tool, high frequency of “Skip” button presses on a narrative sequence, time spent in the new social hub.)	How did this affect the game’s core health? (e.g., D1/D7/D30 Retention, Feature Usage Rate, Churn Rate on a specific difficulty level, Average Session Length, Conversion Rate from free-to-play to paid content.)	What was the ultimate “why”? (e.g., Instinct Fulfillment like Gregariousness or Acquisition) and How did it drive Lifetime Value (LTV)?

You don’t need perfect attribution to demonstrate value. But you must be able to frame your work like this:

“We noticed [Behavioral Change], players were consistently rage-quitting Level 4 because the difficulty curve was too steep, violating their [Instinct] for Assertiveness. We responded by [Design Change Y], adding a mid-level checkpoint and a combat hint system. This immediately decreased our [Metric] Level 4 Churn Rate—by Z%. This mattered because a lower early churn rate directly feeds into higher [Business Goal] Player LTV.”

Even if your design is one small piece of a giant system, you must show you understand the full context it belongs to.

The Game Designer’s Advocate

In games, data is often incomplete. Hiring managers know this. What they want to know is: Do you understand what you should have measured?

If the data is missing, here is a simple framework to demonstrate your value:

1. Qualitative Signals: Don’t dismiss soft feedback. What did you hear repeatedly in user testing? Did you receive unsolicited positive feedback about a new Flow state or a new feeling of Acquisition (the primal instinct) in a specific community channel? Did internal teams start referencing your work as a new standard?
2. Advocate for Tracking: Proactively explain what success would have looked like and what specific metric you would have put in place (e.g., “We were aiming to increase the Gregariousness instinct, so I would have implemented a metric to track spontaneous friend requests after a shared victory.”). This shows you think like a business owner and are an advocate for measurement.
3. Connect to the Missing Instinct: The ultimate question is always “What human problem did this solve?” If you can’t prove the financial success, prove the Instinctual Success. Show that your design fulfilled a deep human need, which, given proper resources, would eventually translate to business success.

Stop describing your design. Start describing its effect on the player and its impact on the business.

Happy Holidays! As you’re likely watching kids tear into giant boxes this Christmas morning, let’s talk about the biggest mistake in game development. A mistake even massive, experienced AAA studios repeat every single year.

They are falling into the rookie trap of mixing beauty corners with gameplay prototypes. I’m talking about that moment when you force a prototype, meant for raw mechanic testing, into a beautiful, highly polished “vertical slice.”

Prototypes with Fancy Bows

Why do studios do this? Because they chase ambition over clarity. They want the investors, the publisher, or even their own team to feel the final game instantly. But when you try to turn a gameplay test into a forced fake vertical slice, you are wasting massive time and money. You are making iteration slow, silly expensive, and often impossible.

You are creating a heavy dependency where there should be two separate, lightweight streams of work.

Keep the Gifts Separate

This Christmas, remember the golden rule of efficient development—and assembly:

1. Gameplay Prototypes are the Instructions (The WHY): These are built for mechanics, feel, and flow. The art should be block-out geometry and colored cubes. They answer: Is the core system fun? Meaning, is there something interesting for the Players to discover? If the answer is no, you throw it away.
2. Art Prototypes are the Decorations (The HOW): These are built for style, pipeline, and tech validation. They answer: Can we achieve this visual fidelity at this frame rate? If the answer is no, you pivot the tech without breaking the core fun.

Mixing them only adds a heavy dependency. Imagine getting a toy for Xmas, and the functional components are glued to the decorative exterior. If the gears break, you have to destroy the entire fancy shell to fix them. That is your silly expensive iteration.

You only merge them in the final vertical slice, once both sides stand on solid ground.

So, as you enjoy the day, remember this lesson from the trenches: Stop making your prototyping process a messy, expensive Christmas morning. Keep the gifts separated.

Marketing works better if the marketer believes in the product. Game design can help with this, if the company allows the communication between designers and marketers.

Sometimes, though, we are working on a game we don’t really believe in. We are there just for the job, someone above makes all the calls and we do not see any value behind the strategy. It happens, more than it should actually.

Everything gets more complicated from there, so one of our duties in this case is to find common ground and push to focus the efforts on that. Because only that may become unique, in the end.