If you're a leader in game dev who feels stuck, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6

Leadership in game dev is hard, but choosing to ignore the biggest technological shift of our generation is a high-stakes gamble.

In this episode, we talk with Benjamin Chevalier, Chief AI Officer at Mighty Bear Games, who has a uniquely informed perspective as an Art Director turned tech leader who has spent two decades building games for Ubisoft, Disney, LucasArts, and King.

Ben Chevalier outlines his pragmatic, principled approach to embracing AI: using it to cut through market saturation, accelerate team output, and manage risk without compromising creative integrity. From the moral and legal controversies surrounding AI training data to the cultural shifts required for engineers and artists to build their own tools, this conversation reveals the mindset and strategies a leadership team needs to not just survive but thrive in the new AI-accelerated development landscape.

What You'll Learn In This Episode:

• Why AI may be an existential business decision
• Why governments won't halt AI development
• How "agentic" tools are reshaping studio culture
• How game dev leaders can get team buy-in on AI
• What others might think of you just for using AI

If you're a game dev leader thinking about how AI might help your team, this episode gives you a pragmatic playbook for adopting AI. Ben Chevalier lays down clear ethical guardrails and shows how AI can speed up prototyping, live ops, and decision-making—so you can level up your leadership and accelerate your team, game, and career.

Connect & learn more about Ben Chevalier:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminchevalier/

Medium: https://medium.com/@benjamin.chevalier

Studio Website: https://www.mightybeargames.com/

GOAT Gaming Platform Website: https://goatgaming.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@mightybeargames

Connect with us:

🔗Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/

🔗BBG's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/building-better-games/

🔗Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingbettergames/#

🔗Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg

🔗YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZpMT-dUwQR-R4Mb4uub6Sw

#GamingCommunity #GameDevelopment #AI #Leadership #MobileGaming

If you're a leader in game dev who feels stuck, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6

Are you leading a team that has plenty of people but can't seem to get moving?

You care deeply about your team and your game, but projects crawl and decisions drag in the. It's almost never just a talent problem. Instead, it's three quiet leadership mistakes that choke momentum.

In this episode, you'll learn what those three mistakes are, how they're showing up in your studio, and what you can do instead so you can move faster and see real progress on your game. We break down the mistakes one by one with simple shifts you can start immediately.

What You'll Learn:

• The Velocity Trap: Why any speed you have is "pretend" if your team doesn't share a clear North Star (Vision).
• The Cart in the Mud: The four specific foundational elements you must have in place to earn the right to scale , and what to do when you realize you've scaled too fast.
• The Crunch Lie: Why overwork and extended crunch quickly make you slower than if you never crunched at all, and how to operate at a sustainable pace.
• A Simple Reality Check: How to rate your studio's Vision, Scale, and Workload (1-5) to identify your biggest blocker and immediately focus your leadership energy.

GameDeveloper.com Article: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/addressing-crunch-the-games-industry-s-worst-practice-2

Connect with us:

🔗Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/

🔗BBG's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/building-better-games/

🔗Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingbettergames/#

🔗Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg

🔗YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZpMT-dUwQR-R4Mb4uub6Sw

#GameDevLeadership #GameStudioLife #ProjectManagement #GamedevTips #BuildBetterGames

If you're a leader in game dev who feels stuck, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6

You can't just test quality into a game at the end. You have to build it in from the start. Ignoring your Quality Assurance team's full value is a fast way to lose millions.

The state of game development is at a challenging inflection point, characterized by high-risk live service ambitions and a brain drain of senior talent. Host Ben Carcich sits down with Nathan Tiras, former Game Dev veteran (Riot Games, Singularity 6), to dissect this instability and dive deep into the discipline seen as an "entry-level" role: Quality Assurance (QA).

Nathan, who worked his way from a QA Analyst at Riot to the Director of QA and Live Service at Singularity 6 (makers of Palia), argues that QA is not just "testing" but a critical quality function that represents the voice of the player. This deep-dive explores how leaders must move beyond the "QA as tester" stereotype to unlock the massive subjective value and risk-prevention only highly skilled, respected QA professionals can provide.

What You'll Learn in this Episode:

• What "quality" really means in 2025, and why the best QA teams shape player experience
• How bringing QA in at pre-production saves time, money, and your launch day sanity
• Why bug counts don't define QA's worth
• The human edge of judgment, creativity, and tribal knowledge that no tool can replicate
• How great leaders build quality teams that protect business continuity and deliver real returns

Learn more about Nathan:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-tiras-he-him-8a45754/

Company: https://www.whatnot.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nathantiras/?hl=en

Board Game Geek: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/95100/nathan-tiras

Check his other YouTube appearances:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2mmERgh19c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyt3bnBgNqk

Connect with us:

🔗Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/

🔗BBG's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/building-better-games/

🔗Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingbettergames/#

🔗Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg

🔗YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZpMT-dUwQR-R4Mb4uub6Sw

#GameDev #GameQA #QualityAssurance #GameLeadership #GameProducer #LiveServiceGames #BuildingBetterGames

If you're a leader in game dev who feels stuck, able to spot problems but struggling to make a real difference, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6

Are you inadvertently forcing your team to serve a tool, instead of letting your tools serve your team and game?

In a recent conversation with Clinton Keith, Ben asked how Clint would help all of game development. Clint's response? "Delete Jira" - and Ben laughed to keep from crying.

Jira is a powerful tool, but in the hands of uninformed game development leadership, it often becomes a weapon against the very teams it's meant to help. Ben, who has used Jira and other tools as a producer within large studios, dissects the common, catastrophic misuses of Jira.

While you might be better off deleting the tool, the real work is about fixing the broken cultural and organizational patterns that turn a simple work management system into the "boss" of your game studio. Learn the four cascading failure patterns that are draining your team's effectiveness and how to correct them, making collaboration and player outcomes your true north.

What You'll Learn In This Episode:

• Why senior leaders keep breaking Jira without realizing it
• How Jira causes centralization and decision bottlenecks
• What Jira DOESN'T tell you, and why that makes it dangerous
• How perverse incentives emerge from overreliance on Jira and other tools like it
• The reason you end up feeling like a slave to the tool
• How to avoid the traps Jira leads you into

Connect with us:

🔗Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/

🔗BBG's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/building-better-games/

🔗Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingbettergames/#

🔗Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg

🔗YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZpMT-dUwQR-R4Mb4uub6Sw

#gamedevleadership #jiraantipatterns #gamedevelopment #agilefailure #buildingbettergames

If you're a leader in game dev who feels stuck, able to spot problems but struggling to make a real difference, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6

How much is your bad code costing you, and how much is your team's suffering just a ritual of amateur theatre?

In this episode, Engineering and Agile expert Tim Ottinger and Ben challenge the core belief systems that plague software development, from the focus on individual productivity to the self-inflicted wounds of long release cycles. They break down the shocking truth about what slows software projects down, the high cost of errors in a complex system, and why doing work when it's easy is the only way to avoid the crushing complexity of doing it when it's hard.

What you'll learn in this episode:

● Why teams might refuse to change and improve the way they work

● The importance of finding problems now, rather than waiting till later

● Why "crunch time" is killing your output, not boosting it

● When to be throwing work away and when to be making things real

Bibliography: https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/faster-and-more-predictable/

Paired Programming Illuminated by Lori Williams and Robert Kessler: The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

More about our guest:

Tim Ottinger is a legendary figure in software development, having programmed since 1979 and been active in the early days of Extreme Programming and Agile. As a Senior Consultant at Industrial Logic, co-author of Agile In A Flash and a contributor to Clean Code, Tim brings decades of practical experience to dissect what goes wrong in most software development and how you can start doing better.

Accolades and Publications:

● Co-Author: Agile In A Flash (with Jeff Langr).

● Contributor: Clean Code.

● Writing Credits: C++ Report, Object Magazine Online, Pragmatic Bookshelf magazine, Software Quality Connection.

● Recognized for: Compassionate and patient approach to working with individuals, sincerely interested in helping people reach their goals.

Social Media and Websites:

● Website (Blog): https://agileotter.blogspot.com/

● Company Blog: https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/

● Twitter/X: @tottinge.

● LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agileotter/

● Email: [email protected]

● Other: https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/

Connect with us:

🔗Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/

🔗BBG's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/building-better-games/

🔗Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingbettergames/#

🔗Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg

🔗YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZpMT-dUwQR-R4Mb4uub6Sw

#gamedev #SoftwareEngineering #Agile #GameIndustry #Leadership

If you're a leader in game dev who feels stuck, able to spot problems but struggling to make a real difference, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6

How do you save weeks of thrash when your team is busy and perhaps even crunching, but your key goals aren't moving?

This solo episode with Ben reveals the hidden cost of avoiding difficult conversations and the simple, 20-minute fix that can unblock your entire game development team. The problem isn't your process, your backlog, or lack of effort—it's failure to pause and actually talk to each other.

You'll learn:

5 signs you need to stop trying to outwork the problems

Why pushing every problem to standup or retro isn't working

How the right conversation can be worth more than weeks of work

Don't let denial or the fear of one more meeting cost you months of development time. It's time to stop wasting effort and have the one real conversation you need.

Connect with us:

🔗Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/

🔗BBG's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/building-better-games/

🔗Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingbettergames/#

🔗Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg

🔗YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZpMT-dUwQR-R4Mb4uub6Sw

#GameDev #GameDevelopment #TeamAlignment #Agile #Productivity #BuildingBetterGames

If you're a leader in game dev who feels stuck, able to spot problems but struggling to make a real difference, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6

What happens when doing the right thing could get you fired?

Every game dev leader faces this nightmare: being held accountable for results but not empowered to make the decisions needed to achieve them. That tension creates chaos, burns out teams, and kills great games.

In this powerful episode, Ben sits down with Clinton Keith, author of Agile Game Development and one of the pioneers of Agile in the games industry. Clinton shares raw, unfiltered stories from real studio crises, including the moment a CEO threatened his team's lives to force change. This isn't a lecture; it's a candid look at what happens when pressure spikes, trust erodes, and leaders have to choose between survival and integrity.

Together, Ben and Clinton break down the industry's most toxic patterns, from "efficient waste" caused by rapid scaling to the trust issues that cripple creative freedom. They also explore how proven frameworks from the military and medicine, like the OODA Loop, can help game studios move faster, safer, and with more clarity.

👉 Watch this episode for a brutally honest look at what real leadership takes in game development and how to lead when the system itself feels broken.

What you'll learn in this episode:

✅ The Accountability Trap: Why even great leaders get stuck in broken systems (and how to break free)

✅ Scale Creates Waste: The hidden cost of growing your studio too fast

✅ The Trust Fix: Why control kills creativity (and how vulnerability builds real leadership)

✅ Beating Bad Systems: How to call out problems and keep your job

✅ Lessons from the Military & Medicine: Battle-tested frameworks that make your team faster and safer

🎮 About Clinton Keith: Clinton is a Certified Scrum Trainer and coach who has worked with over 150 studios worldwide. With experience ranging from building fighter jets to developing Midtown Madness and Midnight Club, he's helped countless teams reduce crunch, improve collaboration, and build games that truly deliver value.

Learn more about Clint:

🔗Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B003AAP51G

🔗LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clintonkeith/

🔗Website: https://clintonkeith.com/

Connect with us:

🔗Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/

🔗BBG's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/building-better-games/

🔗Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingbettergames/#

🔗Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg

🔗YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZpMT-dUwQR-R4Mb4uub6Sw

#GameDevLeadership #AgileGameDevelopment #GameIndustry #StudioCulture #GameProduction

Stop leaving reality behind and ship better games! If you're a leader in game dev who feels stuck, able to spot problems but struggling to make a real difference, there is a path forward that levels up your leadership and accelerates your team, game, and career. Sign up here to learn more: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6

Is your studio living in a delusion that will only end in pain?

Seemingly great teams burn millions of dollars only to shut down because they left reality behind. This episode breaks down the five game dev delusions that kill studios, which I've seen in well-funded, 100+ person teams, unfunded indies, and VC-backed startups.

If you lead a team or want to avoid losing touch with reality, this is for you. We cover five "Ps" of delusional failure: Play, Planning, People, Players, and Purpose AND provide the concrete actions you must take to stay grounded, align your team, and ship a game that makes a difference.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

✔ Why chasing "the first fun" is a mistake

✔ How to spot vapor estimates before they sink you

✔ Why "best people" hiring puts the cart before the horse

✔ The "audience size" trap (and what to do instead)

✔ Why more work isn't getting you over the line

✔ What gives leaders an edge in staying grounded

Connect with us:

🔗Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/

🔗BBG's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/building-better-games/

🔗Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingbettergames/#

🔗Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg

🔗YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZpMT-dUwQR-R4Mb4uub6Sw

#gamedevleadership #gamedevelopment #gamedevlife #startups #gameproducer

Ready to take your game development career to the next level? Join the Game Dev Leadership Accelerator: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6

Do layoffs mean studio leadership is bad?

While the popular answer is often "yes," the truth is more complex. Layoffs can reveal many things, from bad times in the market to failures to manage finances to corporate greed. But if you're a leader, the real test is how you behave when your company's survival is on the line.

Trent Kusters, the co-founder and Studio Head of League of Geeks, joins Ben Carcich for a deeply personal and frank discussion about his experience of laying off almost all of his employees and transitioning the studio into hibernation. Trent argues that leaders are often "ignorant and or untrained" in the critical business, legal, and ethical frameworks needed to navigate a shutdown event with compassion and integrity.

In this discussion, you'll learn:

✅ Why financial foresight and business savvy matter

✅ The true costs of a studio shutdown (even hidden ones like clearing out old desks)

✅ How to build a "rip zone" into your balance sheet to protect everyone

✅ Why living your company values—even when it costs hundreds of thousands—builds a true home for talent

✅ A five-point framework for planning, communicating, and managing a human-centric layoff

Trent's GDC Talk (requires GDC Vault Access) : https://gdcvault.com/play/1035252/Leaders-Working-at-the-Heart

Learn more about Trent Kusters:

🔗League of Geeks Website: https://leagueofgeeks.com/

🔗LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trentkusters/

🔗X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/trentkusters

Connect with us:

🔗Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/

🔗LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/building-better-games/

🔗Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buildingbettergames/#

🔗Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg

🔗YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZpMT-dUwQR-R4Mb4uub6Sw

#GameIndustry #GameDevLeadership #StudioLayoffs #FinancialLiteracy #GameProduction

Ready to take your game development career to the next level? Join the Game Dev Leadership Accelerator: https://forms.gle/nqRTUvgFrtdYuCbr6

In this special Q&A episode for Episode 100, we're answering your most pressing questions from the Game Production Community Discord!

Join Ben Carcich as he dives into critical topics that every game development leader faces, from navigating project pivots to building a healthy team culture. We'll explore:

✅ When to scale your team up (or down) ✅ How to prepare for meetings and ensure they are actually valuable ✅ Why "safe" project pivots don't exist and what to do instead ✅ The common gaps in game production and how to fill them ✅ The evolution of the game producer role over the last decade

This episode is packed with Ben's honest, experience-based insights to help you move past conventional wisdom and build better games.

A special thanks to Jan for curating these questions from the GPC Discord, and for Juney who runs it. 👉 Connect with Jan here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanoyjl/ 👉 Check out the Game Production Community Discord: https://discord.com/invite/gameproduction

Connect with us: 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich 🌐 Website: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg ▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BuildingBetterGames

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#GameDev #GameDevelopment #GameProducer #Leadership #GameDesign