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 wondering whether he was any good, or just good at one studio, is exactly where I was after eleven years at Sony Cambridge.

Highlights

• Growing up in a big gaming household, and why his mum saw games as the best bargain going
• How a physics degree, not a games course, ended up shaping his systems design
• A four-hour round trip commute for one week of QA work experience, at fifteen
• The job interview where the interviewer told him to take the other offer
• The website feature he pitched in an interview, didn't get the job for, and then saw go live six months later
• Seven and a half years on Elite Dangerous, and why he still had to leave

Give it a listen. It's one of the most honest takes on "luck" we've had on the show.

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• https://bsky.app/profile/derinahalil.bsky.social
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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 there than he expected to.
• Joel Morillo bet three years of his post-Navy life on being a creative, moved coast to coast for it, and talked his way into defining a role called "camera designer."
• Nick Heindl got offered a job title he'd never heard of, felt insulted by it, and ended up spending years building an accessibility career nobody had asked him for.

These selections from each episode have some great insight into how to take a leap for a role and make it your own — you'll want to hear how differently each of them describes the exact same kind of jump.

The full conversations are available on Dev to Dev’s Patreon.

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• Matt Brunhofer
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbrunhofer
• Joel Morillo
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-morillo-58861395/
• Nick Heindl
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-heindl/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsulman/
• https://www.instagram.com/pelicanpeculiar/
• https://www.alexsulmanportfolio.net/
• https://bsky.app/profile/peculiarpelican.bsky.social

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 but a straight line — GameStop, a community college art show that changed his life, a run at a scrappy production shop making everything from AR birthday cards to Kevin Bacon narrating a phone app, a hard move to Florida that didn't work out, and eventually ZeniMax Online Studios, where he ended up quietly running three creative teams with no director in sight.

A few of the moments that stuck with me:

• How a community college teacher basically forced him into the meeting that started his entire career
• The four weeks it took at his first studio to go from "filling creative gaps" to accidental producer
• Treating his ADHD and hearing loss as tools instead of limitations
• The moment a new creative director looked at what he'd built and just said "it's yours"

Landon's one of the most genuinely empathetic people I've had on this show, and it comes through in every story he tells about the teams he's led.

I hope you enjoy this revisit and remember if you haven’t previously had the chance, you can catch the rest of the Season 01 content on Dev to Dev’s Patreon right here: https://www.patreon.com/DevToDevPodcast

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• https://www.linkedin.com/in/landonhood/

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 for more soon!

• Leyla Lacombe on how her dad's love of tech became her love of games — and how the teaching has since reversed
• Brandon Van Haren on the brother who started it all, the arcade dad, and the levels he used to draw for his mum
• Nathan Kellman on parents who said yes to everything, and the moment he finally showed them the Diablo IV credits
• Luke Shingleton on a grandfather who never quite mastered a controller, and what living away from home in Ireland taught him about family

Give it a listen and let me know whose story hit closest to home for you.

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• Leyla Lacombe
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/leyla-lacombe/
• Brandon Van Haren
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-van-haren-5ba62544/
• Nathan Kellman
  • https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathankellman/
• Luke Shingleton
  • www.linkedin.com/in/luke-shingleton-542580225

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsulman/
• https://www.instagram.com/pelicanpeculiar/
• https://www.alexsulmanportfolio.net/
• https://bsky.app/profile/peculiarpelican.bsky.social

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 into it — a factory floor, a VFX career, a mistaken belief that you had to code to belong, etc.
• Empathy turned out to be the quiet thread through almost every conversation, whether it was about players, teammates, or the person a tool was built for
• Production got fast — one episode went from record to published in about ninety minutes — though a scheduling hiccup with no backup plan was a real lesson
• Season 3 starts soon, and I've already got a few episodes banked and ready!

Season 2 will archive behind Patreon once Season 3 begins, so if you want the full run of conversations (audio and video), now's a good time to catch up. Go give it a listen — I think you'll hear the thread too.

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• https://www.instagram.com/pelicanpeculiar/
• https://www.alexsulmanportfolio.net/
• https://bsky.app/profile/peculiarpelican.bsky.social

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 film career), the two books she wrote because nobody else had written them, what it was actually like inside Epic during Fortnite's pivot to Battle Royale, and the gutsy — and gut-punching — decision to open a physical escape room right before the pandemic hit.

Highlights:

• How a stray résumé at Activision in the '90s rerouted her entire career path
• Why she wrote the book on game production because the book didn't exist
• What it was like inside Fortnite's live-service pivot, and the lesson about not going "110% forever"
• Betting on herself twice — the escape room, and the freelance restart that followed
• Why she's found more satisfaction backing small indie teams than she ever did at scale

Go give this one a listen — Heather's got a wonderful grounded, no-ego perspective and I think you'll walk away thinking differently about what makes a good producer.

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• https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathermakesgames/
• heathermakesgames.com

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 title, the hype, or the next big genre. He's just trying to add value every single day and to putting what’s important first. That's a mindset I only really landed on in the last ten years, and he's got there much sooner.

Highlights

• Why he didn't know games were made by people, and what finally broke the spell
• The pitch event where a hostile judge tore his idea apart, and how fixing it led to an internship at Reflections
• Driver: San Francisco, and the spreadsheet lesson that changed how he designs
• "It needs to feel good to miss": the Call of Duty rule, and his Mortal Kombat obsession
• Handing over the lead role on The Crew, and why the title is just recognition
• Why he now puts health first and works to live rather than lives to work

Go and have a listen. It's a great one.

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• https://linktr.ee/smithstock
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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 with her siblings waiting for a turn at the family computer, about a teacher who connected her secret animation habit to an actual career, and about landing a Blizzard internship with a demo reel full of monsters instead of the walk cycles everyone else submitted.

But the part that stuck with me most was after Blizzard — when Lana got to Riot and found the studio's animator community was basically three people in an empty room. She didn't shrug and move on. She built it into something dozens of people show up for every week.

Highlights:

• The banned Super Nintendo that started it all
• The mentor who connected animation to a games career
• Why she chose games over a Pixar-track path — it comes down to replayability
• Rigging and animating a Blizzard test character in seven days, on a bicycle with no seat
• Turning three people in an empty room into the Riot Animation Team

Go give this one a full listen — it's one of those episodes that's really about community dressed up as a career story.

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• https://www.linkedin.com/in/lana-bachynski-3281991b/
• https://linktr.ee/latienie