Dev to Dev

This one made me smile. Derin Halil has a habit of asking the question most of us only think: why me? He even asked it out loud, swivelling round in his chair to put it to his head of design. Underneath the laugh is a real story about imposter syndrome, meditations on being lucky, and about finding the kind of work your brain was built for. It also landed for me personally. Derin's moment of wonde...

Hey folks — this week's conversation is one of the most unique yet. Heather Chandler has been in this industry for three decades, and what struck me most wasn't any single credit on her resume — it's how honest she is about the limits of her own expertise, and how she's built an entire career turning that honesty into trust. We talk about her accidental start at Activision (she was gunning for a f...

Hey everyone, this week I got to sit down with Jamie Smith, and it's a conversation I really enjoyed. We'd never met before we hit record, but within minutes it felt like catching up with someone who'd walked a road very like mine. Jamie grew up in Middlesbrough believing games were simply magic. Now he's the one making it. What struck me most was how little he's chasing. He isn't chasing the titl...

I love this conversation with Lana Bachynski (Associate Art Director, Riot Games) — because it's not really about animation, even though she's one of the best in the business at it. It's about what happens when you decide to be the person who shows up. Lana grew up in a house that banned video games, which somehow made her more obsessed with them, not less. She talks about rotating on footstools w...

This week's episode is one of my favorites so far, and it's not because Jay Powell has some big design philosophy to unpack — it's because he doesn't. He told me straight up: "I would never claim to be a world-class game designer." What he's spent thirty years building instead is something almost nobody talks about: the ability to sit between two people who don't understand each other and make a d...

Dev to Dev is back and this first episode of Season 03 is a bit special for me — Steven and I go back, and it was great getting to sit down and finally hear the whole story, not just the bits I already knew. What gets me about Steven's career is how little of it he actually planned. He failed his way out of a computer science degree at Glasgow, and it was his Mum who pushed him toward Abertay's ga...

For this week Dev to Dev is exploring another themed episode, this time from Season 01 around the theme of “Leaping First” — it's three people who all did the same reckless, brave thing: they leapt into a role before it was fully formed, and figured out the rest by doing it. Highlights: Matthew Brunhofer went to LA to write for WWE, took a Square Enix QA contract to pay rent, and felt more at home...

Ahoy folks. This week I’m pulling another excellent episode from the Season 01 archive for a Dev to Dev revisit, because it's one I still think about a lot. Zane Draper and I worked together for a couple of years before our project at Zenimax Online Studios was shut down, and this conversation is a good reminder of why he was always so unbothered by whatever got thrown at him. We get into how a tr...

Hey everyone — this one's personal. I pulled four clips from Season 02 that all circle the same uncomfortable truth: loving this industry doesn't mean it loves you back in equal measure. What struck me pulling these together is how differently that cost shows up. Sometimes it's your body clocking out before your mind is ready to admit something's wrong. Sometimes it's the strange blankness of a da...

Here’s another excellent episode from the Season 01 archives of Dev to Dev. I've known Bill a long time, but this conversation still surprised me. I learned things about his path I never knew — like the fact that he almost became a music teacher, or that he got his ZeniMax job offer literally while his wife was in labor. Highlights : His origin story starts with a Commodore 64, a Nintendo obsessio...

For this revisit of a Dev to Dev episode from S01, I’m going back to the wonderful discussion I had with Landon Hood. Landon and I go back, and getting to sit down with him for Dev to Dev felt like catching up with an old friend as much as recording an episode. Landon was a franchise producer at Blizzard at the time (he’s now Brand Marketing Manager on Heathstone), but his road there is anything b...

In the interim between seasons I thought it would be fun to explore some of the themes that snuck up on me a bit while I was editing Season 2. For this week, I kept noticing how many conversations circled back to family — not as a footnote, but as the actual reason a lot of these folks are doing this job at all. So here's a short collection of some of my favorite moments on that theme, look out fo...

Season Two's Done — Here's What Stuck With Me Twenty episodes down, and before season three kicks off I wanted to properly reflect on this one — not just recap it. Highlights from how the season came together: Leaned hard into talking with people I didn't know well — harder to prep for, even more alive to record A clear pattern emerged: most guests didn't plan their way into games, they backed int...

I love episodes like this one. Tyler Rotheram's story isn't about talent discovered — it's about someone who kept putting himself in rooms he wasn't initially invited to, and made his talent impossible to ignore once he was there. We talked about growing up surrounded by a gamer family, running an accidentally-massive Just Dance club at sixth form, and the sheer nerve of a 17-year-old walking up t...

This one’s for anyone who’s ever wondered who actually makes the gears turn inside a game. Scott Nisenfeld has spent nearly twenty years as a gameplay engineer, and his story is one of my favourites precisely because it isn’t a highlight reel. He fell for games through King’s Quest, but it was the machinery under the hood that really got him — the kind of kid who’d read a board-game rulebook for f...

This one's a good reminder that there's no single road into games. Sangita Nuli came in through plays, film and TV scripts, and a talent agency video games desk — and for years Sangita was convinced making games was simply out of reach. The technology was scary. The interactivity was even scarier. Then Sangita stopped waiting and jumped. What I loved about this conversation is how clearly Sangita’...

WE'RE BACK!!! Thank you for your patience over the last couple of weeks. I'm excited to get things rolling again and this week I sat down with Louis Bayard, and honestly it turned into one of those conversations that made me rethink how I approach my own career. Louis is a level designer — Codemasters first, on Grid Legends and WRC , and now at Third Kind Games on their open-world mountain bike ga...

Ahoy friends. Again apologies but no new episode of Dev to Dev this week due to work and travel commitments. Thank you for your patience and we'll be back next Monday 15th with Season 02 Episode 16!! Find the Podcast at: Spotify Patreon ⁠RSS⁠ ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠Bluesky⁠ Threads ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠Blog⁠ Email: DevToDevPodcast@Gmail.com

Howdy folks, apologies but due to some work and travel commitments there's no new episode of Dev to Dev this week. We will be back on June 15th with Season 02 Episode 16 but in the meantime thank you for your patience! Find the Podcast at: Spotify Patreon ⁠RSS⁠ ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠Bluesky⁠ Threads ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠Blog⁠ Email: DevToDevPodcast@Gmail.com

Hey everyone — this week's episode is one I really enjoyed. Brian Marinari is a real-time rendering engineer at ILM, and his path into games — and then into film — is a genuinely winding one. He's the kind of person who had to be dragged toward what he was great at, mostly by his own curiosity refusing to stay quiet. We talked about the Atari 2600 game Adventure and how it sparked something in him...

This one's been sitting in the queue for a while, and I'm really glad I finally got to record it because Rob's story is genuinely unlike most of the ones I've told on this show. Rob Gardner is a V/O Audio Director at DICE LA, and he got there by being in a band, doing QA for over a decade, almost not pursuing games as a career at all, and, his words, being way too protective of his evenings for wa...

Hey everyone — this week's episode is one I really enjoyed. I'd worked briefly with Sarah in the past but didn't know much of her story, and this conversation filled in a lot of gaps. Sarah's been in the industry for over fifteen years — QA, production, a stint in marketing she describes as a "sabbatical", and a deliberate step away to become a Mum. She's candid and funny and very clear-eyed about...

Hey everyone, really happy to share this one! Tom Miles is someone I've worked with closely, and honestly, doing this conversation made me realise how much of his story I'd never properly heard. Tom grew up in the middle of nowhere in Norfolk, fell in love with games through a brother's Spectrum, spent years trying to get into an industry that kept not quite opening the door, and then spent 18 yea...

SORRY FOR THE DELAY!!! There was an issue with the RSS distributor that I have not been able to resolve. Normal service will resume on Monday (hopefully!) This next episode of Dev to Dev was such a good one! Gonza do Campo grew up in Patagonia playing Atari clones, then spent a decade managing factory logistics, and is now a Principal Producer at 2K in Valencia. The journey between those two point...

In the next episode of Dev to Dev - the podcast about everyday videogame developers and why they do what they do every day - Andy Roberts explores his journey into game development. In some ways this one feels a little like a time capsule from a very different era of the industry - one where curiosity and persistence had to do a lot more of the heavy lifting - but the lessons learned and the insig...