Funsmith Fireside Chats - by Game Design Skills

Mar 08 2024 13 ep. 68 mins 19

Funsmith Fireside Chats - by Game Design Skills Podcast artwork

Every 2 weeks, we have a conversation with a current practitioner of the game development industry such as video game designers, producers, artists, and entrepreneurs to bring you the experience-based insights to help improve your game design and development craft and thrive in the game development industry.

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#13 - Brian Feeney: How to Prove Your Game Ideas With Fast Prototypes

Mar 08 2024 70 mins

Join us for an exceptional Fireside Chat with the incredibly talented Brian Feeney, Design Director at Riot Games. Brian has helped build some of the most unique worlds in the gaming industry, including his work on League of Legends: Wild Rift. In this episode, we talked to Brian about how he got started as a game developer and how his early years of reading video game strategy g

#12 - Nathan Tiras: Important Lessons for Managers in the Video Game Industry

Dec 20 2022 64 mins

We had the honor of speaking with Nathan Tiras, a unique and thoughtful game tester and manager with one fantastic career! His lessons from past work and insights on being the best manager are priceless for anyone trying to succeed in the video game industry. After befriending Brandon Beck, CEO of Riot Games, Nathan Tiras landed a position as a game tester for League of Legends. Hi

#11 - Rian Trost: How to Be a Video Game Tester in the Game Dev Industry

Nov 01 2022 79 mins

Rian Trost is a veteran of video game QA from Sony to Blizzard, he’s helped make some of your favorite games work. If you ever wanted to build a career in testing and QA, you don’t want to miss this! Rian Trost started his career at 19 years old testing his dream game Tribes at Sony. After finishing QA work on Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest Online Adventures, and PlanetSide, he

#10 - Travis Day: What it Takes to Be a Video Game Designer

Aug 23 2022 84 mins

[This is the last interview with my colleague Travis Day before he passed away recently. This episode is dedicated to him] As a two decade game design veteran, Travis Day has a unique perspective on game systems! Known as "The Items Guy" for the extensive catalog of items he created for World of Warcraft, Travis has some stories that will surprise you with how much drama an item dr

#9 - Peet Cooper: How to Thrive Professionally as an Aspiring Game Artist

Aug 02 2022 71 mins

As a 20+ year video game art veteran, Peet Cooper has had the privilege of working with some great IPs including Star Wars, Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, 007, League of Legends and more. He has worked on every sub-discipline under the umbrella of "game art" which includes, but not limited to concept art, animation, illustration, level design, 2D/3D environment art &

#8 - Osama Dorias: How to Become a Lead Game Designer & Thrive

Jul 19 2022 62 mins

In this episode, Osama Dorias shares different leadership and managerial styles to improve collaboration in a diverse game dev team setting. He also dives into how to deal with prejudice and ignorance in the workplace as a game development professional, especially if you’re still in an entry level position in an organization and thrive. Osama Dorias is the Senior Partner Relation

#7 - Milton Guasti: Remaking Metroid 2 Solo & Getting Shut Down by Nintendo

Apr 12 2022 69 mins

You might know him as Doctor M64 or as the creator of “Another Metroid 2 Remake.” - Milton Guasti (Currently at Moon Studios) gives us a play by play of the process of redesigning one of Nintendo’s classics, from changing the map and character art to fit a bigger screen, to keeping the heart of combat pure while at the same time making it more sophisticated and fun. Milton Gu

#6 - Dr. Kelly Tran & Kevin Caldwell: Design Video Games That Make Learning Effortless

Mar 27 2022 66 mins

According to Elon Musk: "Generally you want education to be as close to a video game as possible, like a good video game. You do not need to tell your kid to play video game. They will play video games on autopilot all day." Dr. Kelly Tran and Kevin Caldwell are the founders of Evolved Play, a “Games and Learning” company that focuses on designing ethically and creating softwar

#5 - Barry Hawkins: Using Empathy to Improve Game Development

Mar 09 2022 86 mins

Barry Hawkins is a product development consultant with experience in orchestration at scale for lean, agile teams that practice iterative development. He has done this with software product development companies ranging from 5-person start-ups to hundreds of team members practicing distributed development within loosely-coupled, cross-functional teams. In this episode, we will disc

#4 - Paul Forest: What Do Technical Artists Do In Game Development?

Feb 23 2022 56 mins

Paul Forest is the current Pipeline Technical Director at Amazon Games with the latest release New World. He’s a veteran technical artist and director, who has worked on games across consoles such as Playstation 1 Playstation 2 Playstation 3 Xbox Xbox 360 PC. Notably, he has worked on World of Warcraft and has contributed from the expansion pack Wrath of Lich King all the