Paolo's Blog

Action, Response, Reaction, Consequence, Implications

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 09/06/2026

When we’re designing a new game, we very often look for verbs that describe what players can do. One way to stress-test those actions is to use a framework that forces us to think through every possible consequence.

Action: describe an action in three words or fewer
Response: the immediate feedback the system gives the player to confirm their action has been registered
Reaction: other entities in the system need to react to the action in order to give it meaning
Consequence: the game’s economy must be affected by the action, even if only slightly
Implication: wherever possible, the game’s narrative should also be something the action can influence

Players are the ones who make the story — we simply give them the tools to do it. That’s the best way to think about narrative, in my opinion.

Let’s look at a concrete example:

Action: throw a rock
Response: sounds, particles, objects hit and broken
Reaction: one NPC runs away in fear, another starts attacking us…
Consequence: there’s now a rock on the ground, plus scattered debris that could be picked up and used by the player or by NPCs
Implication: if you break something that belongs to someone, your reputation might take a hit until you’ve paid for the damage

Not every action needs to be put through this lens, but I do think games today should be thinking about these things — it’s what allows a system to respond meaningfully to whatever a player decides to do.

A useful cut rule: when you can’t afford to implement all five layers for an action, ask which layer is load-bearing for that specific action. Response and Reaction are almost always required — without them the action feels dead. Consequence is required if the action involves a resource. Implication is a bonus unless narrative is your core loop. Stripping a layer intentionally is fine; stripping it because you forgot to design it is where games start feeling hollow.

Digital Eye Strain: The Hidden Cost of Hyper-Focus

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 08/06/2026

These days I’ve been getting to grips with the agents from Anthropic and OpenAI, and I can genuinely see improvements in the speed and quality of my work. Where I used to need developers to build prototypes, it’s now much more straightforward to tackle that kind of challenge with Claude or Codex guiding me along.

That said, I’ve recently been noticing a strange heaviness in my eyes by the end of the working day. This weekend was rough, especially Saturday. It felt as though something was stopping my eyes from even moving properly, on top of a general dryness and fatigue.

I found out — credit to Gemini, actually — that this is a pretty common problem. Using AI tends to pull us into states of hyper-focus.

Having to think forces us to take breaks

The first thing worth noticing is that before, I had to take lots of breaks to think things through, look up tutorials, or browse various forums. Everything was slower, obviously, but that also meant natural breaks for my eyes and spending longer on the same block of text.

Now, though, working with an agent means receiving large chunks of text in quick succession. You have to skim through them fast to separate the useful parts from the hallucinated ones, and more often than not you fire off another question straight away — which brings you back to reading another big wall of text.

AI interfaces with dark mode, VS Code with light mode

I’ve moved to using VS Code to manage my agents, since I find it better for keeping an eye on token usage and for other perks like keyboard shortcuts and so on.

The thing is, AI interfaces generally use a dark background, whereas in VS Code I prefer a light one. So I’m constantly switching between the two, which puts extra strain on my eyes.

It seems that parsing text-heavy content like code also makes us blink around 60% less than normal. Medicine calls it Digital Eye Strain, and it’s an increasingly widespread issue.

I hope this post helps others identify the problem. The fix comes down to:

Sync your fonts and sizes so everything is large enough to read comfortably
Reduce contrast where possible, and avoid constantly ping-ponging between different windows
When the AI gives you a long explanation, close your eyes and listen to it instead
Use CLAUDE.md or instructions.md files rather than chatting back and forth with the agent, to cut down on the number of iterations

Don’t Get Distracted

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 05/06/2026

This week there was the Sony State of Play, and the new God of War was announced. The game features Kratos’s wife as the protagonist, with a cube as her companion — not quite what you’d expect. After the event I was scrolling through LinkedIn, and all the “experts” had their take. The character is wrong. The cube makes no sense. Swapping the protagonist’s gender has never worked for other franchises.

Watching the reaction of someone who actually worked on the game is worth more than a hundred LinkedIn posts put together. Honestly, I’m a bit tired of people exploiting the algorithm’s tendency to push outrage content. Especially when those people don’t make video games — they’re not in the trenches. I’d rather hear the passion of someone who actually works on games for a living.

The other thing I want to point out is that Santa Monica Studio has a more than proven track record of making successful games. We should all respect expertise and acknowledge that people who know more than us are probably right. I’m in the process of unfollowing podcasts and channels that thrive on controversy, because they distract from what actually matters.

Video Game: A Complicated Reality

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 02/06/2026

The issue of creating and distributing video games is a complex reality. Talk to anyone working in the industry and you’ll always hear the same thing: “making games is hard.”

During the years when video games received massive investments (especially during COVID), an illogical mindset crept into the industry: treating this delicate reality as if it were a complicated problem.

Complicated problems are solved with the left side of the brain. Building a rocket to go to Mars is a complicated problem. You need experts who, with the right knowledge and reasoning, will get you there. Once the process is found, the problem is solved — barring human error, of course.

A complex reality, on the other hand, requires entirely different skills. Skills for which the right side of the brain is better suited. It requires building certain relationships — both with people and with creative work. There is no single method, no formula. Companies that succeed and rely solely on formulas eventually pay the price.

Game creation and distribution cannot be treated as a complicated problem: it must be respected as a complex reality. Otherwise, it boils down to a game of stolen ideas and performance marketing tricks that only bring in money in the short term. Then, inevitably, someone comes along who is willing to work with fewer protections and longer hours, and overtakes us.

Sometimes I get the feeling that we need more humanists and artists, and fewer mathematical minds and business people, among our executive ranks.

Testimonials for Freelancers

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 01/06/2026

In recent years I’ve watched talented, experienced colleagues — people with years under their belt — lose their jobs overnight. The game they were working on didn’t sell well enough, the studio shifted strategy, or the publisher pulled the funding. The games industry is hit-based.

In this context, the “classic” path — find a studio, work there, build a career — is less secure than it looks. It carries real risks that people often don’t factor in, because we’re conditioned to see a permanent contract as the gold standard of job security, especially here in Europe.

When you work for a company, you have a single client: that company.

If things go wrong for them, they go wrong for you too. When you work as a freelancer, you have multiple clients. Losing one is a problem, but it’s not the end. The risk is spread.

But freelancing isn’t something that just happens by itself. You have to build it deliberately, over time. You need a system: a way to find new clients, keep existing ones, and make yourself visible to people who don’t know you yet.

The crux of it is this: the right clients need to know you exist. Since you’re almost always under NDA, you can’t show the games you’ve been working on, you can’t mention the titles, sometimes you can’t even say who you’ve worked for. The portfolio — the main tool most creative professionals use to present themselves — becomes all but useless for us.

The simplest solution is the client testimonial.

When a project wraps up, before the collaboration closes for good, ask your client to write a few lines about you. Three sentences is enough: what you did, how it went, what they took away from it. What you get is the voice of someone who’s worked with you and can say, publicly, that you’re worth hiring.

It works because it lowers the perceived risk for a new client. Someone who doesn’t know you has no way to evaluate you directly. But if they can see that someone else has already done that evaluation for them — and had a positive experience — the leap of faith becomes much smaller.

What if students made the video game instead of studying it?

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 29/05/2026

You’re studying how Hitler’s rise to fame unfolded in the Weimar Republic. Economic causes, political crisis, beer hall rallies, cut-price populism. Serious stuff, but heavy going.

Then someone in class says: what if we made a beer hall simulator?

You pour pints, serve customers, make money. Hitler wanders between the tables spouting nonsense. Get him drunk enough and his popularity drops. Let him talk and it rises.

That’s a video game. You just designed it. And an AI builds it while you’re talking.

This is the after-school activity I have in mind.

AI applied to video games applied to the humanities. History, philosophy, literature, economics. Games have always been rule systems built on real-world activities and events.

The format is simple. The class sits down. The teacher is the only interface with the AI agent. The students focus on coming up with ideas and coordinating to give it instructions. The teacher types, guides, asks questions. The agent builds. At the end, everyone plays together.

No one needs to know how to code. No one needs to know how to use Godot. What you need is the ability to reason about a problem and work together.

History translated into mechanics.

When a student decides that “drunk equals less popularity”, they’re reasoning about how political consent actually worked in Weimar Germany. They’re building a causal model. They’re doing what historians do, with a tool that feels like their own.

The game forces you to simplify — deliberately. You have to choose what matters, what to measure, what to leave out. That choice is the critical thinking you’re trying to teach. And then you play. And you have a laugh. And that laugh is memory.

New frontiers

Today, anyone with a clear idea and an AI agent can have a working prototype in hours. Not a masterpiece — a prototype. Something that runs, that you can touch, that responds.

Access to creation is no longer filtered by technical ability. It’s filtered by clarity of thought.

Schools already have after-school activities like robotics, drama, and computing. All perfectly valid. But there’s a new territory I think is worth exploring: using AI to turn humanities subjects into interactive experiences that students design together.

Someone will do it, sooner or later. It could start in any classroom.

Do the work, even if no one is paying you yet

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 27/05/2026

Breaking into an industry from the outside has become incredibly hard. And that goes doubly for games, especially if you’re not in a geographically convenient spot — far from London, Montreal, Amsterdam, or whatever hub happens to be hot right now.

Dreaming is fine. But you have to be practical.

The best way to find work is to already have some. A portfolio that speaks for itself, a real project to show, a recognisable voice. If you don’t have work, you have to make your own.

Sitting there sending out CVs and waiting for replies isn’t a strategy. It’s a way of feeling busy while actually standing still. You’re better off using that time to work on a personal project: a prototype, a public write-up, a series of posts — something that actually exists in the world.

The periods when you can’t get your foot in the door are periods to use, not to endure. Develop your voice. Build things. Talk about what you’re learning.

It’ll matter later. Trust me.

How a Game Justifies Itself in 2026

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 26/05/2026

Eduard and I are working on an independent project, since we’re at a point where we can build our portfolios. If this is your first time here, I’m a game design consultant specialising in the ideation and pre-production phase of new casual mobile f2p games. Eduard is my assistant, who joined me recently through a bootcamp where I was teaching. The collaboration is going really well, but as always there are quieter periods where the workload drops off.

The new project is called RETROFP for now, and it’s an idea I’ve been turning over in my head for a while: take the Habby method (find a meta-game that works across several titles and only swap out the core) and bring it to Steam, applying it to the classics that shaped us.

We’ve defined and built a first prototype, learned from it, and now we’re on to the second. It’s also a way to train my collaborator, so we’re taking our time. Lately I keep asking myself: why this game, why now? I think that question is no longer optional, and it breaks down into three parts.

What are you promising the player?

It’s about fantasy and identity: who does the player become while playing?

In RETROFP, the first game is inspired by F-Zero, but it’s futuristic rally racing. The most radical choice we made is this: the car never crashes. You never lose. You just go faster or slower, and that’s it.
F-Zero is a game about speed you have to survive. Ours is a game about speed you inhabit. The fantasy isn’t “hold it together and win” — it’s “nothing can stop you, chase the peak”. Speed as expression, not as risk.

The idea is to give players the freedom to experiment with the physics. In our minds, it’ll be a game that’s satisfying to watch live in front of an audience of fans. We’re building a series of prototypes around this fantasy.

Where do you sit on the spectrum between familiar and new?

Players always want something new, and every game positions itself on a spectrum. On one end, too familiar: it disappears into the noise, nobody has a reason to pick it over what already exists. On the other, too new: nobody understands what they’re looking at, the cognitive cost of engaging is too high.

RETROFP has plenty of familiar elements: the racing, the unlock meta-game, the live events. The new elements are more specific: no crashes, a Habby-style framework applied to Steam (practically non-existent in that form), and a core that changes with each title under the same umbrella.
The pattern is recombination: a proven mechanic taken somewhere it’s never been.

The risk isn’t just in the design — it’s in the marketing and communication too. “You never crash” risks landing as “too easy”. One of the things we’re trying to work out through our prototypes is how to get ahead of potential objections from players and from the people who’ll spread the word (journalists, streamers, and so on).

Why you, why now?

A solid pitch answers two distinct questions that often get muddled together. The first is the commercial why: why would anyone buy it? What space does it occupy in the market? Why now? The second is the artistic why: why are you making this game? What do you want the player to feel that other games aren’t giving them?

For RETROFP, the commercial why is the empty space between Habby’s mobile engagement and Steam’s indie quality. That territory is almost unoccupied, as far as I can tell.
The artistic why is different: we want people to feel the F-Zero fantasy, but we want speed to be a gift rather than an added risk.

The question “why this game?” isn’t a question for publishers. It’s a question for you, first and foremost. And if you don’t have the answer yet, better to find that out now.

Wish us luck!

The present is cross-functional, the future is high-quality

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 25/05/2026

The stores are drowning in games. We can all see it, and it’s a direct consequence of something obvious: making a simple game has become quickly accessible. Godot, Unity, asset stores, AI for code, YouTube tutorials for absolutely anything. Development time has compressed brutally. So everyone’s doing it.

The result is a flood. Clones, games generated through semi-automated pipelines, products assembled rather than designed. Each of these games shares the same trait: made quickly, with a small team or solo, with little investment per unit.

When everyone does the easy thing, the hard thing gains value. Even Roblox is proving this, with its new strategy of focusing on HD games. If simple games become a commodity, then games that require something you can’t auto-generate become rare.

The thing that’s been living rent-free in my head

Teams in the near future have one new defining characteristic: they can be genuinely cross-functional. Not in the buzzword sense we’ve been hearing from companies for years. In a concrete, practical, radical way.

Some examples.

A designer no longer has to wait for a programmer to build a prototype. With today’s tools, they can build something functional in hours. They can test their game loop before the meeting with the tech team is even in the calendar.
An artist can implement directly in-engine without waiting for tech artist support. An artist who understands a bit of how the engine works is no longer an exotic exception — they’re just a normal asset to the team.
A writer can test their narrative in a working build without filing a ticket and waiting for the gameplay team to “find a slot in the next sprint”.

The roles don’t disappear. The excuse does.

To be clear: I’m not saying specialised roles will become useless. An experienced tech artist does things a shader-graph artist will never pull off. A senior programmer solves problems that a designer with an AI coding assistant can’t even properly articulate.

That’s not the point. The handoff barrier between roles gets lower. And with that barrier goes the industry’s most comfortable excuse: that’s not my responsibility.

If in the past you could sit in a cosy niche and wait for someone else to do their bit, today that’s changing. A team that sits around waiting for the “programmer bottleneck” when the designer could prototype, or the “tech artist bottleneck” when the artist could implement, is a team wasting time artificially.

Agility isn’t an abstract value. It’s the concrete ability to take an idea from your head to a working screen in as little time as possible, with the resources available. Today, those available resources have changed.

The thing that’s hard to copy

There’s an underlying question running through all of this: what can’t be automated or cloned?

The answer I’ve landed on is: a team that genuinely works well together, around a vision that’s actually worth building, with enough overlapping skills that no single bottleneck can hold everything up.

That combination can’t be copied. You can’t prompt your way to it.

And it’s exactly that combination you need to make the games that, in the coming years, will have the best shot. What does that mean in practice? That the smartest companies will be the ones capable of retaining talent — not working people into the ground and then laying everyone off the moment the title ships.

A Brief Survival Guide for Junior Designers

Published by Paolo Gambardella on 22/05/2026

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.

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	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.

Paolo's Blog Posts