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.