Laurence Nairne

😁: “We should let players control their character in Pocket Champs.” 😡: “No, we really shouldn’t.” Funny how one design decision can split a team in two. As the Game Manager of Pocket Champs, I’ve seen this debate more than once. In my previous post (link in comments), I talked about how complex making games is, and how giving ownership and trust to a team changes everything. But once you have an autonomous team, a real question shows up: How do you make sure we're making the right decisions for the game? From my experience, it starts with the why. As humans, we jump straight to solutions. “Players want more control.” “It will feel more skill-based.” “It’s more engaging.” It sounds right. But how do we make sure it’s the best decision for Pocket Champs (or for any game you may work on)? And what do we do when someone disagrees? Very often, the person with the highest position ends up deciding. It happens a few times. And slowly, people stop sharing their thoughts. Because every discussion starts to feel like a fight they’re going to lose. So what can we do instead? 🤔 We go back to the intention. Not “Should we add direct control?” But: What game are we building? What do we want players to feel? In Pocket Champs, one of our core intentions is simple: “As a player, I want to feel like a smart coach who prepares the right strategy and then watches my Champ execute it.” That changes the conversation completely. If the core fantasy is about preparation and strategy, does direct control reinforce that? Or does it shift the experience toward reflex and execution? Now the feature becomes an experiment. 🧪 We’re not defending opinions. We’re testing whether something serves the intention. Anyone in the team can say: “I don’t feel more strategic when I directly control the character.” (or the opposite) And that’s a productive discussion. We align on intentions. We test ideas against them. We iterate until the feeling matches what we agreed to build. In my experience, agreeing on the why, whether you call it intention or user story, makes a big difference. Prototypes are clearer. Debates are healthier. And the team makes better decisions. Without that clarity, Pocket Champs would probably have drifted toward a completely different game. We would have slowly turned it into just another casual runner with probably way less potential. It’s not magic. It requires constant care and adaptation to your team and context. But when a team truly aligns on intentions, it unlocks something powerful ✨ That’s usually when better games start to emerge. I’m curious, how do you prevent feature debates from turning into opinion battles?

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Ever had a 'four orange problem'? 🍊🍊🍊🍊 I came across an excellent translator's introduction the other night which really got me thinking - firstly, about the challenges deeply conscientious translators in the games industry face, and, secondly, about the need for human creativity in their profession, in an age of AI algorithms. Here's Robert Hullot-Kentor, on a problem he faced when putting Adorno's 'Aesthetic Theory' into English: "What is hard about translation is not - as those who have never tried it imagine - finding the right word. The right word is always there, it just can't be used: inevitably it starts with the same letter as the three words on either side of it and, in a translation pulling four oranges says fake, not jackpot. Line by line, the wrong word is always, unbearably, coming to the rescue. The sureness with which translation taps fate puts the I-Ching to shame: the word needed at any one point has somehow always just been used in the previous clause to cover for some other right word that would not fit. If translation were just pinning the tail on the donkey it would be easy, but the donkey is running and the translator is riding another beast, going in some other direction: each language, and each and every word, has its own momentary vector. So, for instance, even when the original wants to dictate the right word - e.g., Programm - directly into English, with only a slight shift of spelling, it turns out that the English equivalent now instinctually summons up computers - not the self-understood political sense of the original - with barely containable textual implications. Since the right word was always waiting, and had to be left waiting, this translation is made of whatever else was handy: a carrot for the nose, lightbulbs for eyes, some feathers for the mustache. Propped on a bench in the distance with its back to the sunset, perhaps it even looks alive. But it is not to be leaned against and neither will it bear all that much scrutiny. In German this book is almost too interesting to read; for those many passages in English where this is no longer the case, where it was just not possible to find any better way to do it, for the many sentences that were each finally accepted as not really but sort of what it means, I can only say, it was not for lack of trying." I don't know about you, but I've seen a lot of fake oranges lately, if not outright pulp. And if texts carry even a modicum of artistic integrity, that matters. If it's true it takes a poet to translate poetry, it follows a human with creative flair is required to translate a writer's work in a videogame - unless of course, one deems the beauty in their language trivial - which, of course, is a whole nother problem.

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When I say that 99% of GOOD level design happens in pre-production, this is the kind of thing I mean ...

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Two pieces of contrasting news today - a new No Man's Sky update, and the CEO of Remedy stepping down - both of which showcase the consequences of different roads travelled by mid-scale studios in terms of their strategy for new titles and post launch support. And why should Quantic Dream be taking note of this? With Hello Games and No Man's Sky, their redemption story is so well known and memed-out at this point, that there's nothing really new to add. But it's worth pointing out that this redemption of many free updates, fixes, and improvements was only possible for a few reasons: - The team clearly felt a lot of emotions about the launch state of the game - regret, disappointment, and determination - and channeled it into a plan to fix it. - They self published as a private and independent studio, with no one to answer to but themselves. No CEO or shareholders to put profits over the need to do the right thing by their customers. - Their initial sales success gave them funds to fix the game without worrying about paying the bills. Their next game, Light No Fire, is building on their strengths, and smartly they are using the No Man's Sky updates as testing grounds for features in Light No Fire. Their approach right now is 10/10. With Remedy, it's a different (and sadder) story: - They come from a background of making story driven single player games with fixed campaigns and no multiplayer - As a public limited company, CEO, shareholders, and Tencent mean profits come first - Alan Wake 2 struggled to reach profitability (took them over a year) - FBC Firebreak struggled to break out as their first foray into multiplayer With this, you can extrapolate that the CEO stepped down due to the lack of commerical success of both games. What now for FBC Firebreak? It seems like a difficult road ahead. With enough updates and improvements it could eventually reach a No Man's Sky like redemption, but will the public limited nature of the company allow for that? Realistically it's unlikely. Now, are Quantic Dream paying attention to this? With their annoucement of Spellcasters Chronicles, it kind of looks like they are heading down the same road Remedy did. Is there is a market for this game? It's definitely not playing to their strengths. They said they want to broaden their capabilities, which in principle is a good thing. But like Remedy, they've chosen to make a game that is seemingly abandoning their core audience to chase another. Very risky. Developers like Hello Games (No Man's Sky --> Light No Fire) and Housemarque (Returnal --> Saros) are great examples of how to focus your studio into a new project and grow your audience, not abandon them. The model to follow is right there. In the current development climate, anything else looks like hubris.

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Another day, another cover development post (please free me from this cover cage of my own making). My design team at Lady Umbrella asked for a new mechanic to be developed: They wanted players to be able to move between covers without exiting them. I could have calculated if the player could switch covers at runtime, but I predicted issues with that approach: - It didn't communicate when the connection could be made to the Combat Designers who had to place the covers. - It left no room for exceptions if they ever arose (For example, covers that could but shouldn't connect for reasons outside of the system's scope). - It was an opaque system that made it hard for System Designers to visualize when and how the connection could happen. Instead, I opted to do all of the work in the editor. This allowed me to visualize the connections for my Combat and Level designers as they moved the covers, making the system a whole lot simpler to comprehend and use. Plus, it made identifying faulty covers much faster, as they tended not to connect to each other as they should.

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It’s been a turbulent few years for the games industry and the shift isn’t over yet. My role in the industry, if it wasn’t already clear, is talent-related. We’re constantly speaking with studios across Europe about their projects, challenges, and how they’re manoeuvring around the current gaming industry board game. My perspective... - 4–5 years ago, during and just after the pandemic, player engagement exploded.  - More people were playing than ever before — and with that came more money.  - Studios grew fast, racing to build bigger and better games.     Then it all changed...     Wars, tariffs, rising development costs, privacy changes, funding slowdowns, and shifting player behaviour have all played their part.     The trend didn’t continue at the same pace.     I’ll acknowledge that for some studios it’s still business as usual. Some live service games continue to bring in stable revenue (especially in mobile), helping studios glide through relatively unscathed:   - FTE hiring still happening - Outsourcing for specific elements - Continued use of contractors (good for Evolution!) However, as David King highlighted at our recent event, the industry has been in decline over the past couple of years and the way games are made needs to evolve. Studios that rely on investor funding, publisher milestones, revenue from a past hit…have seen the tap run dry. And when that happens, we see redundancies, projects cancelled, and sometimes studios shut down.     So what are we seeing from our side at Evolution Recruitment Gaming?   - A big increase in the use of contractors - Preference for temporary or backfill roles over long-term hires - Outsourcing larger chunks of game development than before   The industry isn’t collapsing... it’s evolving.   Studios are becoming leaner, more flexible, and smarter about how they resource projects.     So that’s my five cents on the industry... What’s yours?

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Really pleased to share another RPO Embedded partnership for us at Skillsearch. We are now working closely with the fantastic team at Couch Heroes, supporting them across all hiring as they scale. It is an ambitious project with big plans ahead and we are excited to be part of the journey. If you would like to hear more about what they are building, feel free to reach out. We are also in conversations with a number of studios around our embedded model. If you are entering a growth phase or planning multiple hires over the next few months, it could be a smart way to add dedicated recruitment support without increasing internal overhead. Happy to share how it works and what we are seeing deliver real impact for scaling studios.

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Ludoraptor Studio's current project is very narrative heavy and one of my tasks has been to develop a system where the player can view and unlock messages between the main character and their friends and family. My main goal for this system was to set it up so that the narrative team could write and edit text without having to go into the engine. Easiest way to do this is by setting up a spreadsheet where narrative can fill out all of the relevant info. From there, the programming team can download a tsv file of the spreadsheet and import it to Unity. Only catch is, Unity does not support tsv files. I tried using csv files, but since the spreadsheet is being used to import text and commas are a commonly used punctuation mark, it made parsing through it correctly nearly impossible. Luckily, I'm not the first to run into this issue with Unity and others have shared their solutions on Unity Forums. One solution is to use Unity's ScriptedImporter class which is used to write scripts that convert files with specified extensions into assets that Unity can handle. Once I could import tsv files, it became a lot easier to parse through them and display the text to the player. Unity Forum page discussing using tsv files: https://lnkd.in/exTSN4iK Unity Documentation on ScriptedImporters: https://lnkd.in/ePcCKgrg

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Career Facts on Game Audio Jobs: • Fewer than 15–20 senior game audio roles are publicly advertised each year in the UK. Many of these positions are filled through internal promotions or referrals, so even fewer roles are truly available to external applicants. • Senior job postings receive 100–1000+ applicants within days. • UK universities produce 300–500 audio/game audio grads annually, not including self-taught or bootcamp-trained entrants. • Success rate for landing senior roles is <1% per year. • Over a 5-year span, game audio can pay £20k–£50k less in total compared to other audio roles at similar expertise. • Promotions are rare; many plateau for years doing the same type of sound design. • Studios frequently lay off staff, cancel games, or shift focus unexpectedly. • Passion exploitation is common in game audio. • Personal identity often becomes tied to job titles, creating emotional strain. • Work-life balance suffers due to blurred boundaries and unpaid expectations. Game audio may be the dream for many, but it’s usually not sustainable long-term. Keep an open mind about expanding your expertise: learning coding, exploring other aspects of audio or tech & broadcast. Consider your future growth and make your skills transferable to higher-paying opportunities.

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The Game Developers Conference, now rebranded as the GDC Festival of Gaming, has released its 2026 State Of The Game Industry survey. https://lnkd.in/eu_caC7v

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What should you have on your cv when looking for a job in video games? Hiring managers feel free to correct me here...

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New Quick Dev Insights Interview Out! This time I spoke with Liam Lambert, Senior Technical Animator at Rekindled Studios, about: Making Animators’ Lives Easier Through Tech Animation Check out our bite-sized interview 👉https://lnkd.in/epCTWaAV We cover: 🔸 Bridging the gap between art and tech 🔸 Why getting a TA involved early saves time and budget 🔸 Building smarter rigs & pipelines with mGear and Python 🔸 How leveraging existing tools keeps production efficient 🔸 Lessons learned from 15+ years in tech animation I've known Liam for a couple of years now, and we got on straight away over a shared love of parkour. Liam has been working in technical animation for over 15 years, with experience spanning everything from live events to AR and games. That variety has given him a deep understanding of tech anim, something you can tell as soon as you start talking to him about it. I knew he’d be a great fit to share insights into how tech anim quietly keeps projects moving behind the scenes. #gamedevelopment #interview #gamedev #animation #techanim #indiedev #videogame #gamesindustry

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So for a long time I’ve been intrigued by the social and cultural impact of Games on wider society, how we can better communicate those impacts and how we can use that to change the perception of our industry.  I believe that games and the social structures of games are a great way to combat radicalisation, that social games are a great way of fending off the epidemic of loneliness, and that games can be a great way to bring education to neuro diverse kids that may be failed by traditional system…and many more. But most people outside of games don't realise this, and before we can change the way that people look at our industry, we have to be able to change the way we communicate, because we are too insular. And here is step 1... “𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐔𝐊 𝐕𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐨 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐬”, the first step towards properly quantifying the social and cultural impact of games.  But it's only the first step, please read the report, please feedback and share, please look at your own research and add this to the journey as we get better at telling people outside of the industry why what we do is worthwhile. With thanks to Iain Dodgeon, Rachel Addley, OKRE, Nick Poole OBE, Ukie, for building the report, British Film Institute (BFI)’s Innovation Challenge Fund and Anna Casey, Anna Mansi, and Rishi Coupland for helping make it happen. Thanks also to Kristian Roberts Charlotte Panneton Nordicity, Rick Gibson Games Investor Consulting, Michael French MBE, London Games Festival and Jamie Woodcock and everyone who contributed. Visit https://lnkd.in/eD4fh3V2 to download the report. But this is only step 1 on how we better communicate about Games so now time to bring in people that i hope it will help…Dr Richard Wilson OBE Tom Adeyoola, Innovate UK, Georgia Hutchinson, Alastair Jones, Susanna Lazarus, Paweł Jarzembowski, Peter Rice-Chang, Pádraig Condron, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Sam Crawley, Adrian Walewski, Jamie Sefton, Dr Jackie Mulligan, Carl Jones, Paul Durrant OBE, Kirsty Gibson, Reedah N. El-Saie #supercharged, Funding Quest UK, The Games Angels

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Meet our new game, Agents 404 It already reached 35k wishlists! It's a goofy stealth co-op where you play clumsy hitmen who have to take out high-profile targets, hide the bodies, and most importantly → not blow up your own carefully laid plan. This is another prototype we put together while heavily using Bezi, an AI assistant for Unity development. We built a prototype in just one month.  From idea to finished footage. Here's how it came together so fast: We already had a modular base for co-op games from previous stages → movement, networking, interactive objects, and more. (Links to those posts in the comments.) On top of that, for this prototype we added: → A bit of AI logic and stealth → Extra mechanics like a taser (which looks absolutely insane) → A disguise system All of it got prototyped in about two weeks alongside Bezi AI. The full timeline: - ~1 month from idea to finished footage - A few more weeks for the publisher to build the trailer, design the page, and prep the test launch Right now the game is in a marketing test phase together with Polden Publishing. We're buying a small batch of influencers across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to see how short videos perform. If we get organic viral growth and a strong flow of wishlists from it → that tells us the concept works, and we'll keep developing it. So I'm curious: Would this game land with its audience? Would you actually play it? Let me know in the comments 👇

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Technical Direction for your Game Dev team - without the long-term overhead. I’ve got some capacity opening up in March to support a few more UK-based GameDev studios. I tend to work best as a 'fractional' Technical Director - which is really just a fancy way of saying I’m available a few days a week or month to help with the heavy lifting, offer a bit of mentoring, or help solve those specific technical puzzles that crop up during game development. If you’re a small or medium-sized studio, you might find it useful to have an extra pair of experienced eyes on things - without the need to sort out a full-time hire. I’m usually most comfy helping out with: 👨‍🏫 Technical Mentoring Working alongside your programmers (at any level) to help them feel more confident in C++, UE5, or low-level optimisation on PC and Consoles. 💡 Problem Solving Jumping into the codebase to help profile bottlenecks, look at shader development, or tinker with CPU/GPU performance improvements. 🤔 A Bit of Strategy Helping Seniors, Principals or Leads with the "people" side of things such as appraisals or training and development needs - or looking at how AI tools might actually fit into your pipeline without the hype. I generally drop in for 1-2 days a week or month. I’m quite used to hitting the ground running and aim to be a helpful, calming, presence rather than a disruption to your existing workflow. A few specific areas I can help your team dive into: 👉 Training or mentoring existing team members in C++ and UE5 👉 Improving performance, code optimisation, data-oriented design. 👉 Making sense of multi-threading such as synchronisation or UE5 async tasks. 👉 Smoothing out C++ workflows, modular code/components or improving API design for more rapid iteration and incremental development. If you think your team might benefit from a bit of extra support or just a sounding board for some technical hurdles, I’d be very happy to have a quick chat to see if I’m a good fit for what you need. Feel free to send me a message here if you'd like to catch up.

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Following up on my previous post about using Modular Rig for simple environment animation, but this time focusing on a mechanical prop. This prop uses slightly more complex module than the previous one, and the results were honestly a bit surprising (in a good way). ➤ What worked well ✅ Moving beyond single-joint motion is doable, as long as the prop parts are spitted with animation in mind. ✅ Building a skeleton and painting skin weights directly in Unreal works well for this prop, which has a moderate complexity. ✅ Mechanical modules like Hinge and Piston are already well supported out of the box and easy to reason about. ➤ Where friction shows up ⚠️ This still isn’t a full DCC replacement. The quality of the result depends heavily on how well the asset is designed and segmented upfront. ➤ Bigger takeaway For me, this reinforced that Modular Rig lowers the barrier to keeping work entirely in-engine and expands what environment art and level design can include, especially for smaller projects where DCC round-trips aren’t available or are too costly. On top of that, it could potentially enable iteration to happen directly in the level. Still exploring, but I’m curious how others are thinking about where this kind of workflow fits into their pipelines. 🤔 #UnrealEngine #UE5 #TechnicalAnimation #GameDev #TechnicalArt #LevelDesign #ControlRig #AnimationPipeline

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This is a real imposter syndrome moment. What we have here are two absolute procedural geniuses and one extrovert, delivering an introduction to the Apparance Runtime Procedural Generation System. In all seriousness, this is going to be an amazing workshop where we can cater for all skill levels, from absolute beginners who I can help get up to speed, to the artists looking to push their technical boundaries which Oliver Lawson will show the way through to the absolute wizard and creator of Apparance, Sam Swain to help the more experienced get the most out of the session.

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Have been playing a little bit more of Tony Hawk, Skate, MX vs ATV and Riders Republic, but I've been thinking....... why not create a new IP that has it all? Some sort of full extreme-sports universe? 🛹🚴‍♂️🛴🛼 I’m thinking: • Skateboards • BMX + ATVs • Rollerblades • Scooters • Surfboards, Snowboards, Skiing, etc. • Bicycles • Snowmobiles All living in one shared competitive open-world. I think what would be a cool idea would include things such as: Online tournaments structured like the X Games, Olympics, World Surf League, World Skate Games, etc., where players can compete online in a similar structure/environment; also, allowing cash prizes and sponsor opportunities for the player. AI judges scoring things such as style, difficulty, creativity. AI live commentary making it feel like a true live sports event/tournament. Some sort of open-world where you are able to explore the map and try all different sorts of sports and compete in online tournaments, but also have the freedom to freestyle while jamming out to your favorite playlist and maybe even adding something similar to GTA, where you can do things such as shopping, eating, etc. Could be a cool idea to build up something similar to GTA, but more focused on competitive sports events/tournaments. Also, let's not forget about making a legendary soundtrack to vibe out to while you're exploring the map on your rollerblades, skateboard, scooter, etc. Maybe Spotify can partner with an IP like this to connect Spotify to in-game, so you are able to connect your Spotify account to the game and play any music you're feeling that day? From a monetization viewpoint, I feel like there would be a lot of variety to drive revenue for the IP, while also improving the gameplay experience. Bringing in well known athletes to purchase and/or unlock across all these sports, brand collabs, clothing, gear, etc. There could also be "cash prizes" in these tournaments, allowing players to go to shops and buy new gear, clothing, etc., and I could see this as an opportunity to drive microtransactions as well. If someone’s building something similar to this…... I want to be the first one to know about it! 👀

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