Every now and then a guest asks the question out loud that most of us only ever think. Derin Halil, Senior Systems Designer at Wushu Studios, once spun round in his chair at Frontier and asked his head of design, "Why did you hire me?" He laughs about it now, but the question carries a lot. Derin got into games through a physics degree, a games course he only finished after he was already working, and a few months trying to turn experimental muscle-sensing hardware into something playable. On paper it's an odd route. Listen to him talk about how he thinks, though, and it starts to look like the only route that would have made sense.

This one hit close to home for me. After seven and a half years at Frontier, Derin found himself wondering whether he was a good designer or just a good Frontier designer. I asked myself exactly that after eleven years at Sony Cambridge. It's one of the most honest conversations about luck, imposter syndrome and finding the work your brain is built for that we've had on the show. Grab a cuppa, this is the full conversation.

Alex (00:00)
Thank you, Derin. Thank you for making the time. It's the first time we've met, so I'm excited to dig into your history and get to know you a little bit more. I always kick the conversation off with my favourite first question: what first inspired you about video games?

Derin Halil (00:21)
That's one of those questions where everyone's got the same answer, right? It's like, I grew up…

Alex (00:27)
Actually, you'd be surprised.

Derin Halil (00:30)
I always grew up playing games, and that's the same with everyone. But for game dev in particular, I think there was a turning point around the mid PS3 era. The PS3 and 360 era, they were just chucking games out. There was so much, and at a price point that was really competitive. Loads of people have this £35 price tag for a game stuck in their head. It was uncommonly cheap to get hold of games, and trade-in was massive. So my brother and I were playing so many different games that I started asking: why do I like this and not that, even though they're in the same genre? What makes one work and the other not? You could see where certain games were borrowing things from others and paving their own path.

That made me start thinking about what I'd want to do for a living. I was about fourteen, fifteen at the time. At that age, when you're thinking about your A levels and university, I was so torn between wanting to be academic and wanting to be creative. I've always felt tugged between those two, and games does both in a very strange way. It's highly technical, but it's creative at all times. Even if you're doing something really technical, you normally have to be quite creative with it. Games almost feel like they are always fighting you when you're trying to make them, and that's where a lot of that creativity comes in.

Alex (02:46)
I love that. So the games you were playing, and starting to discern what was good and what was bad, led you towards wanting to make them. That's why I use the word "inspired" in that opening question. Lots of these conversations ask what the first video game you played was. I like "inspired" because you can take it wherever you want, and it's interesting that your thought went straight to when you were inspired to make games. So, quickly, where did you grow up?

Derin Halil (03:18)
I grew up in North London.

Alex (03:21)
And you mentioned a brother who was also a gamer.

Derin Halil (03:24)
Yeah, I come from quite a large immediate family. I've got four older sisters and one younger brother. I think my mum saw video games as a very cost-effective way of keeping multiple kids mentally engaged at once. My older sisters played games and tailed off as they got older. I think the switch to 3D was almost a deal breaker for most of them. With the camera rotation speeds and 3D space, a lot of them got motion sick from early 3D games. My brother and I just went straight through it. I can't remember the first time I played the SNES, because it was always there.

My mum would buy games as a relatively cheap way of keeping us occupied, because the amount of entertainment you get for your money is obscene. I think that's kind of unspoken about. There's not much else you can get hundreds or thousands of hours out of from a single purchase. From a parent's perspective with lots of kids, that was a big focus. A lot of those older games didn't have save points, or they were just hard, so we'd play them together, taking turns. We played the original Mario Kart a lot, and the original Mortal Kombat on the SNES, which to be honest we might not have been old enough for. But it was the SNES version, so there was no blood in it.

Alex (05:31)
Just the sweat.

Derin Halil (05:32)
Maybe that was the line for my mum's purchase at the time. So yeah, it was always there, and such a big thing for the two of us in particular. We carried on through our teen years, and we're both still playing games. I went into it professionally and he didn't, but to an extent he's probably more in tune with the gamer perspective than I am now, which I think is interesting.

It's not that my knowledge as a dev trumps him as someone who plays games. I've just got an entirely different perspective, and you lose the perspective of being a player, which is almost innocent. You see things from one side of the curtain, and when you go to the other side, sure, I can still think about things as someone who plays games, but ultimately I've gone past that curtain. So I'm always empathising without really seeing it fresh. There are awesome things about appreciating games from that new perspective. But you also see the light and glimmer in someone's eyes when they look at something that's really cool from the player's side, and as a dev you look at it and go, "I know how they did that."

Alex (07:13)
I have that with my kids sometimes. They'll get really excited about something and I catch myself going, "Yeah, but…" because of some behind-the-scenes thing, or the company, or the way it's built or whatever. I know exactly what you mean. So it sounds like you grew up very much in a gaming household, and that seeped into your career ambitions at a relatively early age.

Derin Halil (07:38)
Yeah, pretty early. I always did quite well academically, but there was always a pull to be creative, because I like making things and thinking about the things I make. I always enjoyed building and crafting things with my hands, and I was really worried about losing that as I went into adolescence. I really liked DT and product design, and I did product design at A level. I think that kept me there.

Sometimes I feel it's not that games shaped me. I just fell into games because of what it requires of me and what I like doing. If other industries offered the same things, I'd be drawn to them. The games industry almost seems like a weird niche for what I want to be doing, almost irrespective of the games. As much as I like games, the work I'm doing feels quite unique and tailored, and that's what I enjoy.

Alex (09:05)
That's a very interesting perspective, and one I share. The process of making them is almost its own draw, over and above loving playing video games. When did that crystallise for you? You studied game design through City and Guilds, didn't you?

Derin Halil (09:29)
Yeah. I knew I wanted to work in games, and originally it was "I like video games, I want to work in games." But the more I learned about making games, the more exciting that became. I originally wanted to do a games design degree, and there were very few at the time. Games degrees are relatively new. Ten, fifteen years ago only a few universities were doing them. When I said this was what I wanted to do, I got a bit of kickback from family. The worry wasn't the games industry, it was doing a very, very niche degree.

I went to university in 2012, the year of the big UK tuition hike from £3,000 a year to £9,000 a year. So doing a very specialised degree at a very high cost was a big red flag for my family. They urged me to do a STEM subject instead. From their perspective, if you've got the aptitude for a STEM degree, don't squander the chance. Do that, and do a games course separately.

So I did my physics degree, and either side of it I did a games course with Train to Game. I started it before uni, paused it while I was there because uni took too much time, and picked it back up afterwards. It was originally going to be TIGA accredited, but because I kicked the can down the road, it became a City and Guilds course. I actually finished it while I was in the industry. I got hired relatively quickly out of uni, and it's hard to study and work at the same time. I was about six to eight months into working when the course organisers said, "We'll have to cancel your course if you don't finish this." So I finished loads of coursework, sent it in, and they sent me my diploma back. It was all really unconventional by today's standards.

Alex (12:31)
That sounds like a crazy, great combination. Was there a particular reason you chose physics? Was it just something you were passionate about?

Derin Halil (12:43)
Yeah, I just really enjoyed it. People look at me really weird when I say that. I had a teacher in secondary school who was so much fun, and the spin she put on physics made it really cool. It ties into the way of thinking I apply to my design work. It's always about systems, equilibrium and balance, making things work, connecting one thing to another. I really enjoyed that methodical way of working, breaking algebra down and balancing equations. At A level I realised I preferred physics to something pure like maths, because the application helped me put what I was studying into perspective. At university I had some pure maths modules and really struggled, because it was so abstract I couldn't get a gauge of what the numbers meant. That cemented what I loved about physics.

To be honest, I apply more of my physics degree to what I do for work than what I learnt in my games course. I spend so much time building formulae and thinking about flow charts and processes. Everyone works in spreadsheets and does flow charts, but the hyper-vigilant maths I apply is almost niche, because a lot of designers now, especially people coming out of uni, approach everything from the toolkit's perspective. Some games design degrees are almost "we're going to turn you into a one-person dev machine," and you can go away and make a video game, which is incredible. I could not do what some grads do. The quality of their coursework is insane. But that doesn't translate to the day-to-day of what designers end up doing.

That's where my degree puts me, in the weird niche of systems design, and it's exactly where I want to be. I didn't even realise that until about four or five years into working. There was so much work on the project, and a new manager came on while loads of people were moving off to another project. I stuck around, so he leaned on me for a lot of legacy knowledge, and he threw smaller tasks my way. A lot of them were flow chart based, exploring whether we'd hit bugs or inconsistencies with existing systems. He looked at me and said, "You're a systems designer. What have you been doing the last couple of years?" I'd been doing scenario creation and level design. He took me aside and said, "I think you've been wasted a little bit," and threw me into systems design. I enjoyed every minute of it, and I've stuck with it ever since.

I've been fortunate to stay in that niche, because as a designer you do get moved around and become a bit of a Swiss Army knife. That's a difficulty with the discipline, as I'm sure you appreciate. It's so wide that there are things you're good at and things you're less good at. It's liberating when you want a break and can say, "Can I do a bit of level design for a couple of months?" But the expectation that you can do everything at a really high level is tough. So I'm quite happy that for the last couple of years I've been cemented in one point on that star chart of design skills.

Alex (17:46)
You found the perfect niche, and it tracks back to what you love doing. In those early days you had a couple of work experience opportunities, right? QA, and then game design at a small studio. How did those come about, and what did it feel like to actually do the job, even for a short time?

Derin Halil (18:13)
The QA was literally UK school work experience, a couple of weeks. It actually started with me wanting to shadow someone in an art studio, because at the time I was thinking about going into games art.

Alex (18:40)
Interesting.

Derin Halil (18:41)
I had that big pull towards being creative. I was doing art and graphic design at GCSE, and I was sending emails to anyone I could find an email for. My sister worked in recruitment at the time, not in games, but she knew her way around LinkedIn and how to find who worked where. She spent an evening on it and gave me a big list of emails and said, "Go send emails." It looked like black magic to me as a fifteen, sixteen year old.

I can't remember anyone's names, which is really unfortunate, but I got through to someone at Criterion. They agreed to a phone call, and I was sweating bullets, I was so nervous to be talking to a game dev. The games industry was this black hole of mystery and wonder. You had no idea how games were made, and it was way less documented then. YouTube had only been out a little while. You couldn't just go and watch tutorials. And at the time I was literally playing Burnout Paradise, so I'm on the phone to someone at Criterion going, "My god, this is really weird."

He was asking me aptitude questions. I'd sent a bunch of scans of my artwork, and I remember him saying I had a great aptitude for drawing and should keep it up, and asking if I had any experience with digital art, like Photoshop. Back then you didn't really have free licences for Photoshop unless you got an unofficial copy, and you weren't learning 3D art. I'm in North London and they were in Guildford, so he thought it would be a bit wild to travel all that way just to follow someone around the office all day, and a bit of a waste.

But he put me in touch with Andy Robson, I do remember his name, at Testology, which was in Aldershot. Andy agreed to have me in to do some testing. It was one week rather than the full two. I'd travel into central London, about an hour, then get the train from Waterloo to Aldershot, another hour. So a four-hour round trip each day, because that's what I wanted to do. It was a level of exposure I otherwise wouldn't have had.

I tested a game with such a long name: Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mysteries of Little Riddleton. The team showed me how bug reports worked, and the deal was: if you find bugs, log them, and they'd check whether it had already been found. That still happens. I get bugs and close them as dupes. I think they were a bit shocked that I found a couple of bugs that hadn't been logged yet, and I was super excited about that.

The second week I shadowed my sister around her recruitment office, because they couldn't fit me in for both. But it was so cool to have that chance when everyone else was working in retail, in a Maplin or a Woolworths. That direct industry experience really cemented what I wanted to do. Being around people who were so casual and really loved what they did made me realise that's exactly what I wanted. Especially in stark contrast to the week after in my sister's office. Everyone's in a suit and tie, I had to wear a suit and tie, everyone's head down on the phones, pin-drop quiet unless the boss made a joke, and then everyone cracked up. I thought, "This is really uncomfortable. I definitely don't want to do this for the rest of my life." So I knew the typical corporate office job was absolutely not for me. It was a nice bit of reaffirming.

After university, my first role making games wasn't in a game studio. It was at an advertising studio, UNIT9, working with some acquired technology. It's a strange one to explain. They'd hired someone who'd built this for their master's, and in hiring him they bought the rights to the hardware too. They were trying to gamify it. I went into that interview having just finished my physics degree and nearly finished the games course, and interviewed with one of their founders, who'd done a joint physics and chemistry degree. He was super excited to be talking to someone else with a straight STEM degree.

The hardware was a piece of biometric kit that read muscle signals and fed them into a program. It also did the reverse, sending an electrical signal to your muscles for strange haptic feedback. They were trying to figure out what on earth they could do with it and whether they could package it up. A lot of that needed some physics, working with the waveforms going into the program, doing Fourier transforms and a bunch of other jargony maths and physics. Anyone they hired purely for the technical side wasn't going to do the game design part, so I fit this absurd Venn diagram, and they hired me on a fixed-term contract for a couple of months. They took it to a couple of tech events and were very pleased with it. If I'm right, there was a government grant for investing in games at the time, and they'd got it and had to spend it. So my salary was basically burning through that grant for two or three months.

After that I didn't have work for quite a few months, and I came very close to giving up on working in games. It's really disheartening to apply and apply and have it go nowhere, which any grad will tell you. I was having that over ten years ago, and I can only imagine how tough it is right now. Then I got a response from Frontier, an application I'd totally forgotten about. Sometimes you get a rejection straight away because you applied right at the end and they've already got their twenty people to interview. I think I'd applied right at the beginning, so I just didn't hear back for ages. Then I heard back, did the interview, and that was my first role in games. I was at Frontier for about seven and a half years.

I remember some office chit-chat with a grad VFX artist who was asking everyone about their backgrounds. I gave him a very condensed version of this conversation, and he was a very blunt young man. He looked at me and said, "So why'd they hire you?" From his perspective, I didn't have a games degree, and on paper I wasn't anywhere near as qualified as a lot of people. To be honest, that was a bit of imposter syndrome I'd held on to for a couple of years. I was a senior by then, so I just laughed it off. My head of design sat right behind me, so I did a one-eighty on my chair and said, "Lawrence, why did you hire me?"

Alex (30:25)
Ha ha ha!

Derin Halil (30:27)
He got a real good chuckle out of it. But it came down to those two, three months on that odd hardware. He said it was so weirdly different from anything else anyone had put through that it immediately made them want to interview me. From their perspective, I'd worked with new hardware and tried to actually make something of it. It wasn't just on the CV. It went to TechCrunch, and even if it didn't ship, people interacted with it and played it. It became a playable prototype at least, and I think that impressed them.

And at the time they'd just been bringing Elite Dangerous to Oculus. For a really long time Elite was the demo game for Oculus. So they had a fresh sense of what it was like working with uncharted territory in hardware. It was right place, right time, weird overlap of niche. If I'm absolutely honest, I think it was blind luck, because of how specifically those cards landed. I always say to people, you have to figure out where that luck is for yourself. You can't carbon copy it. But building yourself to be someone who stands out is where the work is, and it'll be different for everyone.

Alex (32:38)
Absolutely. But the way you describe being really excited for the opportunity, and that UNIT9 project in particular, sounds super hard. "We don't know what this is, what can we make out of it?" It's not a structured "here's the design, go execute." It makes sense that someone would say, "If you can navigate that and succeed, you'll do well somewhere with a bit more structure." You mentioned the gap between that project and landing at Frontier, and almost losing the passion. How did you keep yourself busy? Were you keeping your skills sharp?

Derin Halil (33:22)
I was really torn between pushing forward to find a new role and finishing the games course. I didn't know whether finishing it would help my applications, or whether I'd feel worse getting rejections after spending all that extra time on coursework. I was in a really weird limbo. But I also knew I'd just finished a degree that was highly hireable, especially then, so I wasn't putting all my eggs in one basket. I was interviewing for other kinds of roles too.

One was a web optimisation company. Their whole thing was, "Come to us, we'll make your website work better, A/B test things and get you more sales." They had me do a case study in my own time and present it. Looking back, I think they did that cheeky thing where they have people do work and then just steal it. I can't believe how much time and effort I put in. I built a PowerPoint with screenshots of their live client's website, lined up so that when you pressed the clicker the page actually scrolled, like you were interacting with it, and I tracked where you clicked.

They were having a sale, and I think the site was Currys or PC World. I can't remember if it was before they merged. One of the features I pitched was "sort by savings." I'd never seen anyone do that, but I grew up in a big family and I'm inherently frugal. I did it on TVs: if two TVs are both £500, but one is £500 RRP and the other is £500 down from £1,000, that's the one I want. They already had a price filter, so I showed them: filter for your budget, then sort by savings to see which gets you the most for your money. I saw the interviewer's face light up, like "Why have we never done this?", and I thought it was going really well.

They said they'd call me back, and I was super excited. At least I'd have work and could keep applying elsewhere. Then I got a rejection email saying they thought I was too creative for the role and that I would get bored and quit at the first chance I'd get. Oddly enough, I think they read me like a book. They knew I wasn't really interested in what they were doing. But six months later I saw that feature on the website.

Alex (37:11)
Hahaha!

Derin Halil (37:14)
Which cracked me up. The other one was a data role at an advertising company. In my mind, that was still somewhere I could work with numbers and be systems driven, balanced with being creative, and maybe I could sidestep into one of the more creative roles. I was psyching myself up for it, and on my way to the interview my phone pinged, and that's when I got accepted for my Frontier role.

I absolutely knew I was going to take the games role, but in my heart of hearts I couldn't just cancel on them. So I went in, did the interview and the presentation, and at the end they offered me the role on the spot. There were three people interviewing me, and it was probably the most uncomfortable I've ever felt in my life. I think it was a paid internship for a year that would lead to a hire afterwards. Straight out of uni, I asked, "What's the salary?" It was exactly the same as Frontier's. I asked if there was any wiggle room, and they said no. Earlier I'd mentioned what I was passionate about, including the games course, so the woman leading the interview gave me a little nudge and said, "Take that other role." I think she could see it.

Alex (39:37)
She could see it, yeah.

Derin Halil (39:40)
I do sometimes think how different things would have been if I hadn't got that email on that day. I was such a people pleaser back then. I feel like I've grown out of it a bit, but I don't think I'd have had the heart to quit if they'd given me the job and I'd then got an offer elsewhere. If that email hadn't arrived right when it did, I might have been working in advertising.

Alex (40:09)
That's crazy. I love that you broadened your horizons. Even though games was clearly your number one, you were open to other opportunities that satisfied what you needed: the creativity and the numbers. But you got the job, started as a graduate game designer and worked your way up to senior. Like you said earlier, you did quite a bit of different design: scripting, level design, live ops, balancing. I'm assuming at that point you weren't clear on which aspect you loved most. Did you gravitate towards one? Was there anything you really didn't like, or anything you thought, "Actually, I quite like this"?

Derin Halil (41:10)
At that point, the type of design I wanted to do was always the next one. What haven't I done yet? I want to give that a go. When I've mentored junior designers and grads, I've always said, "Don't pigeonhole yourself if you don't know what you want to do." Some people know at university they want to be a level designer, and when you know, you know. If something scratches that part of your brain that says "this is my happy place," no one's going to convince you otherwise. But so many people don't know, and I was definitely in that bracket. I was just so excited I wanted to do all of it.

It was a live game with so many moving parts. I've worked with people who joined that project and left it, and they all say it's just so much. It's such a big game, an interwoven beast of systems and mechanics, with so much to sink your teeth into. As a grad I really enjoyed level design, building scenarios and telling a bit of a story. Elite is a game with a story without a story, because the narrative happens in the background and you can take it or leave it. The levels work by dropping you into little instances in space, and at the time it was all environmental storytelling. Maybe an NPC would spit some text dialogue at you, and that was it. No interaction, no communications.

During my time we updated that. We introduced Lua scripting and built scripted scenarios where you could choose a side in a conflict you came across, and they'd send you actual voiced dialogue. The cool part for me was seeing the evolution of the project. I didn't join at its inception. The game launched in 2014, they released Horizons at the end of 2015, and I joined in time for its season pass. So every three months it was a new feature, release, new feature, release. That was really atypical, because live-service games didn't really exist in that way yet. You had massive MMOs like WoW, but there could be years between patches, almost massive extensions to the game. This was a new injection every three or four months: new levels, new mechanics, new features.

It was weirdly addictive. While you're wrapping up and working on bugs, you're hearing about the next thing and how they're going to start it, knowing you'll be brought on at some point. I really enjoyed that evolution of design. It isn't really a type of design, but that whole beginning-to-end process is a bit of a design in itself. Things change all the time. You have something planned in your head, you start working on it, and three months later it's nowhere near where you expected. But it's where you are, for better or worse, and you figure it out as you go.

As a grad and a mid-level, you often feel like you're doing grunt work. The big decisions are being made and you're making the content. The design team was very top heavy when I joined and very bottom heavy by the time I left. There was so much seniority that they didn't need us exploring paper design. In a weird way that was really good. My games course was very paper-design focused, writing concepts and pitches, so all the game design I'd done up to that point was the one bit I didn't get to do on the project. I'd think, "I've got an idea for that feature," and it was, "Don't worry about that, worry about this." I quite naively resented that at the time.

But I was absorbing everything I hadn't learned on my course, which was more in line with what people study on a games degree. My time as a grad filled in all those missing holes and rounded me out as a designer. The work I do now really is more paper design. I'm in spreadsheets and writing documents. But without having done those other parts, you don't have the appreciation of who's actually going to build this. What skill set does the team have? Can we feasibly build it, or am I designing something for a team of twenty when we've got six designers who'll have to bleed, sweat and cry to get it built? Which obviously no one wants. So it's an evolution of perspective, I suppose.

Alex (48:49)
Although that live-service process is gruelling in many ways, it's excellent for a young designer. You go through a compressed version of the life cycle: it has to be concepted, prototyped and executed in a tight window. That's a good furnace to fire a young designer, whereas some people join a project and don't ship anything for two, three, four years.

Derin Halil (49:24)
That was a bit of an oddity, because technically, to this day, I haven't worked on a game from the very beginning and shipped it as a final title. I remember managers explaining the rule of thumb: you're a grad, you ship your first title and get promoted to mid, maybe you ship another and go to senior. Not that it should be time served, but the time lined up with the experience you'd pick up. I felt a bit like a prototype for what happens when you work on a game that's continually updated. Elite came out in 2014 and it's still getting updates. Twelve years on, you could have joined when I did and still be working on it, and never done that beginning-to-end launch. Because so much of the industry has moved towards games as a service, that's already become more and more of a thing. So the upward trajectory for devs has entirely changed.

Alex (50:53)
Definitely, and with the development times we have now on some of these big games, that's a challenge too. So, over seven and a half years at Frontier, and then you move to Wushu. What led to that?

Derin Halil (51:08)
I left Elite as a project first, because I felt I was done on it. There was so much more I wanted to do. I definitely miss that project. I could easily have worked on it until I retired.

Alex (51:30)
Ha ha.

Derin Halil (51:31)
But it's exactly what we were talking about. I needed to work on something from the beginning. I wanted to work on the vision of a project, and I made that very clear to my boss. I had opportunities to move earlier, but it was always to a project that had been in development for six months or a year. Pre-launch, but the underlying vision and systems had been decided. It would have been balancing and tweaking, getting it just right for launch, and I'd spent so much time doing exactly that. Even towards the end on Elite, when I worked on brand new systems, it was always integrating them into the rest of the game, which is probably harder than building a system from scratch in some cases. I had an absolute hunger to work on something from scratch, even if it never launched. That "we've got a bit of direction, but it's kind of a blank slate" feeling.

I started on a fresh project at Frontier, and then an email popped into my inbox asking if I'd consider a move. I pulled that thread, and that was my move. The interesting part was a full circle of imposter syndrome. On one hand, I didn't have the background many of my peers had, especially as new grads came in under me. You look at their portfolios and what they're studying and think, "I didn't do that. Did I cheat my way in here?" Then you get over it. Then it came round again with a new question: am I a good designer, or am I just a designer for Frontier? A studio has a way of working, a way of seeing and talking about things, a cadence to how meetings run and development works. Even if you move across projects, from Elite Dangerous to the Jurassic World games or one of the Planet games, there are differences, but the studio is the same. I felt I needed to work somewhere else, just to know I could do it. And then you move and find it's all the same. But that was the push for me. I wanted a fresh perspective.

Working with Wushu is co-development, which was an entirely new kettle of fish. I'd skipped traditional beginning-to-end development and gone straight into live service, and now co-dev, which is a whole new way of working where a game isn't made by one studio. You look at the credits and it's like the end of a Marvel movie: ten minutes of credits and fifty, sixty companies. You've got your internal managers and bosses, and then external ones too. Working across time zones is wild. I'll log on in the morning and see the client's still online, but it's 8pm for them and they probably should have signed off. You get a window first thing where you can drop them a line and they might respond. Then six hours of no client contact, then two or three hours before you sign off. It's so different from working internally, where you take for granted how much access you have to your colleagues.

Alex (56:15)
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm working co-dev at the moment as well, and it's a really different, interesting challenge versus all being on one team pulling together. It has similar challenges, because making games is hard, but co-dev adds an interesting layer. And I had the same mentality when I was at Sony Cambridge for eleven years. I thought, "I have no idea if I'm any good. I've only ever worked at one place. I'm going to go somewhere else and see if I can cut it." I'm conscious of time, so a couple of other questions, Derin. You mentioned falling in love with the process of making games as much as playing them. Has that affected the way you play games?

Derin Halil (57:05)
Yeah. It goes back to that perspective shift. Talking to my brother or any friend who plays games, I look at it from a dev's perspective, not a player's, because I've had that peek behind the curtain. Some games are fresh and new, or have a great spin on something familiar, and I absolutely love that. The difficulty is games that aren't run-of-the-mill but aren't reinventing the wheel either. Great presentation, plays smooth, mechanically solid and fun, but as a designer there's nothing in there making me go "wow." So it's changed the games I play and what I like about them, for better or worse. The downside is talking to those same people, who aren't excited about the same things. I'll say, "Play this, it's really good," and sometimes it really lands, and sometimes they're like, "I don't know why you like that."

Some games in the last couple of years have been absolutely awesome. Balatro was bonkers good. I think I'm responsible for getting at least ten or fifteen of my friends borderline addicted to it. Blue Prince last year: I was so intrigued, then I got to a point where I thought, "Okay, I'm done," and turned it off. Two months later a YouTube video popped up showing the inverted rooms, and I'm like, "What is this? There's more!" Stuff like that, where you get blown away by other people's creativity, is really cool. You can experience that as a player, of course, but knowing the process, you appreciate that someone had the idea, and that they saw it through and made it playable. We all have ideas, and sometimes we just can't get them to work. It's like skiing uphill. In other cases it's budget risk: it's too much of a risk to work on something a bit out there and bonkers. That's why the indie space is so fantastic. They take the risks larger studios won't.

Alex (1:00:25)
An overall deeper appreciation for the execution that other people might miss. Same here. And what about as a human? Has making games changed you as a person?

Derin Halil (1:00:40)
I think it's a bit of both. The way I approach some parts of my life has become increasingly methodical because of how I think about things at work, and it's hard to separate yourself from that. But the opposite is true too: as you change as a person, the way you approach life and work changes. Code switching aside, the me at work and the me at home are the same person underneath. That's some of the beauty of working in something creative. You get to put yourself into your work, and if you grow and change, that goes into your work as well. And anything you learn at work you carry through the rest of your life.

Interpersonal skills are a really good example. Being able to read a room, learning when to speak and when not to, playing your cards at the right time. If you have six ideas in your back pocket, which one do you put forward, and when? You can't dump everything on your manager's table at once, because they won't have time to read it. That's all stuff you pick up and take away. There are so many transferable skills in games, across all disciplines really.

Alex (1:02:35)
I like that it's a two-way street. Doing the job changes you, and you change how you do the job. And going right back to the physics, the methodical aspects you loved so much seem to have found their way into how you like to design and what you like to design. That's a great through line. Well, Derin, thank you for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation. Great journey, and great to see where it's taking you. You mentioned luck. I've done a lot of these conversations now, and like me, many of us feel it was just luck. But I think a big part of it is preparation meeting opportunity. The way you approached it and how passionate you were is what led to the luck landing at the right time, and you continue to build a great career in this industry. I appreciate you sharing your story.

Derin Halil (1:03:36)
Thank you for having me.

Alex (1:03:37)
Thank you.