Industry Veteran About Coding for Games

This is a conversation with Ricard Pillosu, an industry veteran with over 20 years in both AAA and indie teams, currently working as Co-Founder at Epictellers a 30+ head team working on the CRPG Starfinder: Afterlight.

Links to my Guests

➤ Starfinder: Afterlight on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/3245640/

➤ Epictellers Website: https://www.epictellers.com/

Listen to the podcast on the go (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.):

➤ https://tyrollerjonas.podbean.com/

0:00 - Intro

1:21 - Why Big Success Can Be Dangerous

3:31 - Luck Is 70%

6:13 - The Hardest Part of Building a Studio: People

7:57 - Ric’s Journey so Far

9:45 - Becoming a Lead and Manager

12:30 - How Does AAA Build Games?

16:02 - Prototyping Rituals in AAA

18:29 - Pre-Production and Messy Realities

20:41 - Scrum Era, Sub-Teams, and the Human Factor

22:50 - Charisma, Toxic Positivity, and Milestone Negotiations

26:51 - Reputation Traps in Big Teams

29:19 - Is Experience Overrated?

30:56 - Culture Clashes and the Timeline Fallacy

32:49 - Wisdom Over Experience

39:12 - Choose Simple Solutions

41:55 - Enforcing Pipelines

42:26 - From Overengineering to Readability

46:24 - When Copying Is Okay

47:18 - Don’t Pre-Architect

49:18 - Pick Patterns Per Problem

54:16 - Be Nice to the CPU

55:45 - Why Godot?

58:40 - Signals, Call Stacks, and Deferring Work to the Frame

1:00:37 - Queues and Frame-Slicing

1:02:43 - Start From the Game: Feature Wishlists

1:04:24 - Why Decoupling Matters

1:05:46 - Turn Manager Example: Building Layer 0

1:12:06 - Layer 1 Orchestration: Game States and Combat Manager

1:14:18 - Syntactic Compression

1:17:47 - Micro-Managers: Mouse and Targeting Systems

1:20:48 - What Makes a Great Gameplay Programmer

1:22:56 - Anti-Patterns: Ego, Overcomplication, Blame

1:24:39 - Coding Into a Corner: It’s Part of the Journey

1:28:49 - Jonas’s Background and Goals

1:31:18 - Coding Mastery vs Commercial Success

1:34:02 - Path to Mastery: New Engines, Teams, and Contexts

1:35:22 - Reuse and Scalability Myths

1:36:10 - Why Build Multiple CRPGs: What Really Transfers

1:37:48 - Boredom and Scope Creep

1:41:42 - Why Second Games Take Longer

1:42:53 - Everyone Should Build an Engine

1:48:20 - Why Unity/Unreal Feel Bloated

1:50:49 - Godot’s Incentives: Smaller, Developer-First

1:52:11 - Will Godot Grow? “Fighting the Engine” Metric

1:56:41 - When to Pick Godot, Unity, or Unreal

1:57:05 - Closing Thoughts

My game "Thronefall":

➤ Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2239150/Thronefall/

➤ Discord: https://discord.gg/gVYctptyg8

➤ Nintendo Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Thronefall-2669627.html#Overview

My game "Will You Snail":

➤ Play Will You Snail on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1115050/Will_You_Snail/

➤ Join the Will You Snail Discord: https://discord.gg/G3mRDrK

For the game developers among you:

➤ Join our creative game dev community on Discord: https://discord.gg/Ye6zzfQ