This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Some time ago I wrote a fairy tale, and I found an artist who’s helping me bring it to life visually. She sends me sketches every week for review, I give her feedback, she applies it — sixteen images in total. This is taking up a huge amount of my time, and it all started from a desire to leave something behind for my daughter, just in case I disappear too soon. I’m not expecting success, or to sell millions of copies — I’m well aware of the quality of my writing and my limitations. I’m doing this purely for the joy of creating.
Machine learning helped me visualise this fairy tale, and it pushed me to look for a professional to illustrate it. That’s certainly a good thing, but I have to say it’s eating into my personal time more than I expected. Delegating doesn’t simply mean putting money in and saving time — it means committing to working on something together with someone. I forget this far too often, and I end up spreading myself across a thousand projects that I never see through to the end. It’s a pretty common trait among creative people, and I wanted to share it with you today.
I’m hoping to publish my fairy tale by Christmas — I’d like to print some copies in Catalan and give them to every child in Maria Laura’s class. Then I’ll post the link on my blog and on my LinkedIn, so it’ll be possible to buy it in Italian and Catalan.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
From what I can gather, Miyamoto never wrote a single line of code for his games. In an old Iwata Asks, lead programmer Toshihiko Nakago describes how it worked. Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka would sketch levels in pencil on enormous sheets of graph paper. Nakago’s team would then enter the data by hand, block by block. In the evenings they’d burn everything onto a ROM, and the two designers would play through the level. Corrections would come back as pencilled notes on the sheet. “We could barely manage one round of changes a day,” Nakago recalls.
One cycle a day. Today, with a language model open alongside the editor, I can run one every two minutes.
I’ve written before that the lone genius is a myth and I still believe it: without Nakago there would have been no Super Mario. Today, a language model handles part of what used to be that dialogue between designer and programmer. But the dialogue itself remains — and the way Miyamoto engaged with it says a lot about what our craft is becoming.
The designer as director
I like to picture Miyamoto as someone who knew what he wanted and knew how to communicate it. His job was to describe: where the block goes, how high the jump reaches, what the Goomba does when it hits a pipe. Translating that into assembly was someone else’s problem.
Something similar happens with AI. I can describe a mechanic, a character’s states, the edge cases, and get back a script for Godot or Unity that implements them. The quality of the output depends on how clearly I’ve thought things through — the more precise I am, the fewer tokens I’ll burn.
The designer decides what should happen, why, and what it should feel like. Writing the code becomes a part of the process you can hand off. I touched on this recently when writing about junior devs: the job has always been to instruct a machine until it becomes a game.
The limits of today
The NES had 2 KB of working RAM. Nakago describes hunting for free memory: with twenty bytes to spare, you could add ten more blocks to a level. Some of the most enduring solutions in gaming came out of those constraints — like the clouds and bushes in Super Mario Bros., which are the same sprite recoloured.
Miyamoto didn’t program, but he knew those limits inside out. That’s why what he asked for was always actually buildable.
AI has its own limits, and anyone using it needs to know them just as well. The model forgets whatever falls outside its context window. It gives different answers to the same question. If it’s running in real time inside a game, every call has a latency and a cost. Knowing these things lets you design around them — and sometimes turn them into mechanics: a character with a faulty memory, an unpredictable oracle, a world that shifts every time you visit it.
Ten cycles a day, then a hundred
In the same interview, Nakago mentions that with later tools they could iterate on a level ten or twenty times a day. Today the loop between idea, implementation, and playtest is compressed almost to nothing. I tweak the gravity, play it, tweak it again.
That shifts the bottleneck. Before, the constraint was how fast someone could implement a change. Now, the constraint is how fast I can tell whether the change actually works. And to figure that out, I have to play, feel, compare. The feel of a jump only reveals itself with a controller in your hands.
What AI doesn’t know
AI can write code, sketch dialogue, generate assets in seconds. But it doesn’t know when a level has gone on too long, when an enemy arrives at exactly the wrong moment, when a jump tips over from challenging into frustrating. It doesn’t experience joy, boredom, or tension. It’s good at imitating solutions others have already found; deciding which ones to keep is down to whoever’s actually playing.
That’s why I think the game designer’s value is shifting even further towards taste, pacing, and an understanding of player psychology. Those are the qualities that made Miyamoto’s work timeless — and he honed them with a pencil and a sheet of squared paper.
Three things to practise starting tomorrow
Write specs that someone else can execute. Take a mechanic you know well — Mario’s jump, say — and describe it in ten lines. Then hand it to a model and see what comes out. Every gap between what you had in your head and what you see on screen is a place where your description was fuzzy.
Learn your tool’s limits. Miyamoto knew the NES’s memory; learn what the model gets wrong — where it gets confused, what it forgets, when it starts making things up. That’s design-relevant information.
Play more than you generate. When an iteration takes two minutes, it’s easy to crank out fifty of them without actually playing any. Set aside time to pick up the controller and make a proper judgement — and write down what you felt before you ask for the next change.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
I remember my first job in video games: a small company in the South of Italy that distributed arcade machines and VLTs. The company had kicked off a project for a Linux-based machine, shipped once to the customer; games were then loaded via an external drive and a decryption smartcard.
My role was to help design and develop those games using a proprietary engine. In practice, I spent most of my time writing Lua. I hadn’t finished university yet, and I was making a lot of mistakes. More than once I put blocking calls inside a loop and the game would freeze. I used global variables where I shouldn’t have, and a change in one place would break something on the completely opposite side of the codebase. As I said, the company was very small, and my boss often caught these things too late, by which point they’d already become a crisis. Which inevitably led to some tense, frantic moments.
It was a tough gig for someone with no experience and no consistent guidance. I know now that the problem wasn’t just me: in a team that small, nobody had time to review my code. Code review was a role that simply didn’t exist. And so, line by line, I was accumulating technical debt without even realising it.
A junior in my position today would have an AI assistant at their side — one that flags, before the code ever reaches the boss, that a particular call is going to block the loop, or that a global variable is going to come back and bite them in a fortnight. Essentially, the review I never had. When I think that juniors in the near future won’t have to run those same risks, I feel genuinely relieved.
Then again, the job of a junior developer or designer has always been the same: instructing a machine to become a game. The language, the syntax, the tricks to stop everything from crashing — those are just the means to an end. If a tool takes care of the means and limits the disasters, the junior has more room for the part that actually matters: figuring out whether the game works and whether it’s fun.
That’s why, when I read that Epic Games wants to develop its Marvel and Star Wars shooter with an “AI-first” approach — code and art generated by AI, with humans directing and overseeing — and when Tim Sweeney talks about a major shift for the whole company, I look at it all with a degree of scepticism. And yet I feel that the underlying intention — setting aside, obviously, the one about cutting costs — is a positive one and could genuinely make things better.
If I were a junior today, I’d use the time AI gives back to me for two things. The first is building connections: getting to know other developers, going to events, getting your face known. The second is developing a real understanding of what players want. Play a lot, but critically — pick a successful game and ask yourself why it works, what need it meets, at what moment it makes you want to play one more round and at what moment it makes you put it down. Someone playing an arcade cabinet wants to feel skilled within a few seconds; someone playing a management sim wants to feel in control. These are questions no AI can ask on your behalf, and that’s where a junior can genuinely make a difference.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
This past weekend I was completely captivated by the stream of news about video game code decompilations. This came after a week of surprises, in which I discovered I can basically have an idea and see it come to life immediately. On my own, without asking anyone for their time.
Make your own mix
At work I built something that would have been unthinkable three months ago, but for obvious reasons I can’t go into it. In my personal life, I’m studying Catalan and I made a video game for my class, starting from an expression we use a lot: tros de quòniam, which roughly means “a person who’s not the sharpest tool in the shed”. In class we’d done a verb trivia game, so I asked my teacher if I could photograph it. Then, using all the free material available online, ChatGPT helped me structure my own version.
My idea was to keep the dice roll and add objectives to complete — like in mobile puzzle games — which drive much stronger engagement. There are four colours, one for each verb family. Each correct answer is worth ten points multiplied by the dice roll, and filling the bar lets you capture the “trosset” of that colour. Mistakes don’t set you back and there’s no timer, because the goal is to learn.
When I think about it, there isn’t a single new element in this game. The class trivia game, the exercises from official sources, the dice, the progress bars from mobile puzzlers — all of it already existed. The creative work was deciding how to fit the pieces together. You can try it here, if you’re studying Catalan.
What I’m seeing now is that people are using Claude to decompile games and mash them together. In the video below, for instance, someone merged EA’s Skate and Modern Warfare 2: the player can switch to third person, hop on a skateboard, and shoot enemies while doing it.
This is absolutely fascinating, and it breathes new life into the many mechanics that repeat from one game to the next.
I can picture a future where belonging to an ecosystem lets players try out whichever combinations appeal to them. You finish Spider-Man and Wolverine, then use each character in the other’s game. New life for what you’ve already bought. Really exciting stuff.
As a game designer, though, the first thing that springs to mind are the problems. Spider-Man is an acrobatic improviser — he hits and bounces between enemies, and his combat is designed with lots of space and spread-out foes. Wolverine’s combat is far more brutal and visceral, all close-quarters. Put Wolverine in Spider-Man’s New York and you immediately wonder how he moves between skyscrapers without webs. Put Spider-Man into Wolverine’s close-range brawls and his acrobatic rhythm has nowhere to breathe. Every game builds its enemies, levels, and camera around its protagonist’s core verbs. The most interesting mix is the one that forces you to rediscover a game you thought you already knew.
Thoughts on creativity
Some people might raise an eyebrow — fairly enough — at this avalanche of novelty arriving within the space of a few weeks. There are genuine ethical issues tied to all of this. For me, though, creativity somehow exists outside the reach of overly conscious logic and deliberation.
In one respect this situation resembles the question of chasing trends, which I struggled with a great deal working in mobile free-to-play. Chasing trends is a fundamentally anti-creative act. Being aware of trends certainly enriches your knowledge, but creativity is a process of discovery rather than an exact science. Those who chase trends always stay on the too-familiar side of things. A good mix starts from something the player already knows and adds just one surprise: familiar enough to get them in the door, fresh enough to keep them there.
In the same way, having these new tools available unlocks an enormous number of opportunities. Here’s a concrete example: before, to run some experiments and show the team I had a worthwhile idea, I’d have to ask the producers to assign me at least one artist and one programmer. Today I don’t need any of that. I’m not spending anyone else’s time, and that gives me a much wider space to explore. I can make five rough prototypes in an afternoon, throw four of them away, and discover things I didn’t even know I needed to ask.
Impossible to ignore
I use tools that are built on the large-scale appropriation of intellectual property, and that’s simply true. But the benefit from a purely creative standpoint is enormous. There are people more talented than me who could do without them — I can’t, and right now I’m not blocked.
My personal limit is to use them only for prototypes. I’ve written a story, La Principessa Melone, which I hope to publish in Italian in December. I illustrated it first with ChatGPT, and it was precisely those images that helped me understand what I was looking for — which then sent me looking for real artists to actually draw it. The prototype helped me figure out what I wanted, while the book itself will be drawn by human hands.
I don’t know how long this will last: there are various ethical and geopolitical questions that could shut down certain services within hours. So I wouldn’t recommend anyone build their strategy around any of this.
But it’s impossible to deny that we’re looking at a dazzling and in some ways incomprehensible situation, because everything is moving incredibly fast. My practical advice: prototype a lot and quickly, and keep anything that really matters out of a service that could be gone tomorrow.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
A few weeks ago, a LinkedIn contact proudly showed off their vinyl shelf. They mentioned they also have Spotify Premium. But the records they truly love — they want to hold them, not just stream them.
For years the narrative in entertainment has been straightforward: physical is dead, streaming and digital are the future. But recent data tells a different story.
The American vinyl market has crossed the billion-dollar mark for the first time, marking its nineteenth consecutive year of growth (RIAA, 2025 Year-End Music Industry Revenue Report). Something similar is happening in film: while standard DVDs continue to decline, 4K UHD Blu-ray sales have risen 12%, a sign that the most passionate audiences want to own their content in uncompressed quality, without depending on a platform-tied licence (Digital Entertainment Group data, as reported by FlatpanelsHD).
What about video games?
Here, platform holders are moving in the opposite direction. Disc drives sold as optional accessories, a constant push towards GaaS, ecosystems designed to go ever more digital. I understand the short-term logic: digital margins are higher, distribution costs less, player data is easier to collect. But optimising for short-term margin risks alienating the most loyal core audience — the very same people who, in music and film, are today driving the physical revival.
It’s true that in volume, digital still leads aggregate sales, especially when you lump together mass-market multiplayer titles and premium single-player experiences. But high-end single-player games are emotional investments. Players don’t just consume them — they collect them. I know people who keep the cases of the games that shaped them on their living room shelf, just like my friend keeps his records on his.
On that note, have a listen to this gorgeous Ukrainian lullaby from the new Stalker 2: Cost of Hope DLC:
Why digital is still winning, for now
Geopolitical pressures on supply chains and component costs currently give digital distribution a real cost advantage, and that’s the main reason platform holders are pushing in that direction. But when supply chains stabilise and fatigue around digital licensing — that feeling of “you don’t actually own what you buy” — keeps growing, I think physical will find its moment of revival in gaming too, perhaps on a smaller scale than before, but still meaningful.
Chasing digital uniformity to chase a trend risks losing sight of a simple principle that vinyl and Blu-ray have been quietly proving for years: premium content creates premium collectors.
My gut feeling is that platform holders are abandoning their most loyal fans too soon, all to run after a passing industry trend.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
There’s a saying from Cilento (a region in southern Italy) that goes: “when strength fades, arrogance grows.”
I took part in a meeting about the creative vision for a project, and I put forward some “unique selling points” — elements that could make it stand out. I flagged the ones that, to me, were already floating around in the air, and suggested a few more. That was my way of opening up the discussion with the team. My role wasn’t a managerial one, but I needed to get a conversation going and hear what my directors had to say, to get a better feel for the project.
My proposal was shot down before it even got off the ground: a colleague — a designer — told me that “unique selling point” is a marketing term and has no place in game design. Everyone else in the room backed him up, and the discussion died right there. It felt like a classic case of pointing at the moon and someone staring at your finger: I’m trying to show something — which might be interesting or might not — and instead people take issue with the act of showing itself. This is what happens when you’ve been doing the same thing for years and start believing you’ve already figured it all out. But in the world of video games, where everything depends on so many human and contextual factors, nobody ever truly knows anything, deep down.
Beyond the frustration of the moment — and perhaps I wasn’t great at anticipating how that might land — what bothers me more is seeing how many designers fail to recognise the value game design brings to the business. Treating marketing as something lesser, something disconnected from the real work, a mere sales tool and nothing more — that’s just ignorance, as far as I’m concerned. Especially in 2026, when technology lets us cover more ground than ever before, there are elements of marketing that absolutely need to be folded into game design.
Reducing marketing to the act of selling alone is a pretty basic mistake. Marketing takes time — it’s about building relationships and trust. Game design can’t afford to detach itself from that process. Plenty of modern studios, before they’ve even released a single demo, are already setting up Discord servers. Building community, they call it (even if what’s being built isn’t really a community in the true sense — but that’s a separate conversation). Game designers are active in these spaces, engaging with people to understand how to improve their game. That is marketing, when all’s said and done.
When we talk about “unique selling points,” yes, the concept of selling is right there in the phrase — but the phrasing itself implies an intention rather than an immediate action. Getting to that sale means passing through stages where game design is absolutely critical. Thinking about why a player, three to seven years from now, should buy our game — rather than just doing whatever feels right in the moment — is maturity. It’s professionalism. It’s craft.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Yesterday I went out for dinner with my family at a restaurant. I asked for details about a dish, the waitress gave them to me, I ordered it. When it arrived, several of the things she’d described were missing. I pointed it out, she went to speak to the chef, who sent back the message: “that’s how the dish comes.”
I’m unlikely to go back. And for a moment I thought about leaving a negative review on Google Maps. I went to look the place up, read through the existing reviews, and found plenty of positive ones and just as many negative — the negative ones almost always about the exact same thing as my experience.
Adding mine would have just been noise on top of noise. And when you think about it, what we’re really doing when we leave a review like that is feeding a platform and potentially damaging someone who, that evening, had simply made a mistake. I let it go. If someone asks me to recommend a restaurant in future, I just won’t mention that one.
What struck me, thinking it over afterwards, was why that dish had bothered me so much. It wasn’t just the missing elements. It was that the explanation I got — “that’s how it comes” — left me with no sense of control: I couldn’t understand what had happened, I couldn’t avoid it next time, the blame sat entirely outside me and was presented as a fixed house rule. If the chef had said “you’re right, we missed that, let me redo it,” I’d probably have left happy anyway. It’s the same mechanism that makes a player get angry — not so much at losing, but at not understanding why they lost and not knowing what to change next time. Negative reviews, whether for restaurants or games, more often come from that kind of frustration than from the difficulty itself.
And players leave reviews on platforms far more often than a customer leaves a review for a local restaurant. That review, on Steam, has a direct impact on a game’s sales. It’s why platforms in my industry have overtaken even personal recommendations: your opinion, if you write it there, carries real weight (unlike with neighbourhood restaurants, thank goodness).
How do you survive in this kind of situation?
I was watching an interview with a designer who says he doesn’t play other games during development, so as not to be influenced. The interviewer points out that Shigeru Miyamoto has said similar things on several occasions — arriving at his own solutions rather than retracing what already exists.
I work in exactly the opposite way, probably because I don’t make my own games but work for third parties (clients and GSC Game World, at the time of writing). When I start a new design I always look for the unique and distinctive elements by starting from what the competition is already doing. Pareto’s rule applies: 80% familiar territory, 20% novelty. To put it into practice I use a few platforms:
I use Gemini and Claude for research
I use Steam to study competitors’ capsules and descriptions, and to read reviews
I use YouTube as a kind of quick playtesting proxy
A concrete example: if I’m working on a progression system, I’ll first go to Steam and read what players love or hate about similar systems that are already out there (that’s my 80% — what the audience already expects and recognises). Then I look at where all the competitors start to look too much alike, because that’s where there’s room for the 20% of novelty that makes a game stand out without scaring off the people who try it.
It also depends on the kind of work I do: I can’t play the “misunderstood genius” when I’m working for a client — I need to meet their requirements as professionally as possible. But I don’t experience that as a creative compromise. Looking first at what already exists and figuring out what I can adapt, recombine or recalibrate is a genuine working method, not an imposed constraint: more often than not, the smartest move isn’t to invent from scratch, but to find the right lever in what already works.
Platforms, in this sense, help me enormously — speeding up tasks and bringing solid data to help me align with the client. The very same platforms that now dominate the games industry are the ones that provide the most valuable tools for improving what I do. On the other side, though, the most skilled creators use them differently, and go out of their way not to let them have a hold over the creative process when it really matters.
Maybe the answer isn’t to pick one approach over the other, but to know when to use each. Platforms as a research tool when I’m working for someone else and need to understand what the market expects. Silence when I’m working on something of my own and want it to come from an idea, not from a comparison. And in both cases, the lesson from the restaurant stays the same: whether you’re reading reviews or designing a system that will generate them, the right question isn’t “how harsh is the verdict” — it’s “does the player understand why it happened, and do they feel like they can do something about it next time.”
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
La crisi che stiamo vivendo nel settore dei videogiochi deriva principalmente dal fatto che il potere si è spostato dai publisher alle piattaforme. Una delle piattaforme contemporanee più rilevanti è Roblox.
Anche se il suo modello di business è discutibile, il 50% dei bambini americani apre Roblox nel corso della settimana. La piattaforma è estremamente accessibile e presente su molteplici dispositivi. Il che mi riporta, a mio avviso, a un momento simile all’inizio degli anni ’90, quando la gente iniziava a chiedersi cosa fosse davvero un videogioco — il momento in cui nacquero Baldur’s Gate e titoli simili, per capirci.
Lo dico sempre ai miei colleghi e clienti: se il tuo gioco esce tra sette anni, il pubblico a cui ti rivolgi in questo momento sta probabilmente giocando su Roblox, Minecraft e Fortnite. Fare previsioni è impossibile, perché i videogiochi toccano corde molto personali e le tendenze vanno e vengono. Un gioco in stile anni ’90 potrebbe tornare di moda nel 2030 — non lo sappiamo.
Eppure noto una tendenza a voler ignorare queste mode, in gran parte perché non corrispondono a quella che consideriamo la nostra idea di come dovrebbe essere un videogioco. Siamo cresciuti con certi valori, quei valori vengono oggi messi seriamente in discussione, e questo porta inevitabilmente a degli attriti. È del tutto umano cercare di evitarli con qualche scusa, perché fare i conti con ostacoli reali fa anche male.
Quindi, per quanto sia vero che Roblox ha permesso la diffusione di un gioco in cui era possibile pagare per derubare bambini dei loro personaggi virtuali e umiliarli, è altrettanto vero che moltissime persone scelgono quella come forma di intrattenimento. La formula del successo, secondo me, sta nel trovare il modo di far convivere i nostri ideali con queste nuove tendenze.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
In 2022 I decided to try switching careers, from mobile to PC/console games. You know the ones — in crisis, not growing, running on increasingly expensive hardware, built by hundreds of well-paid people over seven years on unsustainable business models? Yeah, those. Well, not exactly those — I’m being ironic… but you get the idea.
I actually managed it this year. In March I joined the ranks of GSC Game World, the creators of the legendary S.T.A.L.K.E.R., thanks to a recommendation. “We need people like you,” my friend Adrian told me in August 2025, and seven months later I was in. After years of a career in mobile and now moving to PC and console games, I’m realising just how much I still have to learn about game design. The shift in mindset is sharp.
Mobile and premium
In mobile, speed and execution efficiency are everything, because the business runs fundamentally on performance marketing. Companies pay to acquire users (when a game is free, your time becomes the currency), so the whole game is about retaining them and nudging them towards small payments to keep them hooked.
Premium titles are a completely different story:
First of all, there’s a direction to discover — somehow — together with your team. It’s about creating a memorable experience, built on a fantasy that taps into something players genuinely desire. You can’t run quick experiments the way you do in mobile; instead, you have to think carefully through all the possibilities a feature opens up.
Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. already have their audience, a good chunk of whom are very vocal online. The ability to listen to all those voices and turn feedback into concrete design decisions becomes essential. In mobile, it’s more about making changes and watching behavioural data, since the players who spend the most and keep the business afloat — the so-called whales — tend to be pretty quiet.
Everyone has their passion, their ego, and their experience, so working on premium game design means finding the meeting point between personal creative vision, business sustainability, and technical feasibility with the developers. A decision made today could have ripple effects five to seven months down the line. Very different from mobile, where you can iterate much faster and where personal creative vision only goes so far (see: dark patterns that nobody actually likes, but that we all end up using anyway because there’s no real alternative).
Technology and AI
Lately a lot of players have been emerging promising to speed up content production, and the most popular technology is obviously artificial intelligence. However, the critical judgement, vision, and systemic sensitivity needed to build this kind of product make these tools less useful than you’d think. You need to think very strategically, and you also need leadership skills to navigate the different habits and personalities within a team. No algorithm helps you with that. You’re far better off picking up a hobby, exercising, reading history and philosophy to understand what makes people tick.
I’m happy, and that’s what matters. My little business isn’t in crisis, I’m also building an indie game, and I’m in a very creative phase of my life. Most importantly, I’m getting my hands on things that are real — things that actually matter.
This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Watch this:
Things like this put me in a difficult headspace. On one hand, I feel all those emotions that led me to choose this career path in the first place. On the other, though, there’s this strange sense of sadness. I’m aware that it’s very unlikely I’ll ever put my name on something so memorable that its soundtrack gets played at GDC in that kind of spine-tingling way.
And not for lack of wanting — let’s be clear about that. But there are a number of things I can’t control, which may or may not put me on the right path. I mean, just imagine hearing the music from your game being played, and catching those little yelps of excitement from the audience who loved the experience.
That’s the ultimate goal I’m chasing in everything I do, but it doesn’t depend on me alone. It depends on a huge number of factors, most of which are out of my hands. The most likely outcome, if we’re being honest with ourselves, is that something like that will never happen. My career will never reach those kinds of milestones — if you just look at the numbers.
That’s why I choose to focus on the journey, not the destination. I’m not really the type who goes “I believe in this game, so I’ll develop it on my own if I have to, because it needs to exist.” I’m someone who grew up — in terms of play and culture — in tabletop RPG clubs. In nerd circles, listening to alternative music, never dressing fashionably. Actually having a real disdain for trends. Today I’m different; I’m still that guy, but also a man with his own values, and my goal is to pass those things on to others. I focus more on my relationships with the people I work with, with my team.
Because, sad as it may be, it’s the truth: in all likelihood, I’ll never work on something that becomes truly memorable. But what matters is to keep working with passion on whatever comes my way.
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The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
