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PODCAST

Dev to Dev

Dev to Dev is the podcast about everyday Videogame Developers and why they do what they do every day - the many folks whose work shapes the games we play. Hosted by Alex Sulman, a veteran of nearly three decades in the industry, the show highlights the passion, challenges, and personal journeys of those often overlooked in gaming’s spotlight.Inspired by Greg Miller’s 2015 Game Awards speech recognizing a developer in the credits of a game he"d just finished, Dev to Dev continues that spirit of

business careers

All Episodes

01:06:21

Dev to Dev S03 E06 - Derin Halil

Dev to Dev ·

2026/10/12

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

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01:15:39

Dev to Dev S03 E05 - Heather Chandler

Dev to Dev ·

2026/10/05

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

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01:04:37

Dev to Dev S03 E04 - Jamie Smith

Dev to Dev ·

2026/09/28

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

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01:06:39

Dev to Dev S03 E03 - Lana Bachynski

Dev to Dev ·

2026/09/21

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

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01:05:51

Dev to Dev S03 E02 - Jay Powell

Dev to Dev ·

2026/09/14

This week's episode is one of my favorites so far, and it's not because Jay Powell has some big design philosophy to unpack — it's because he doesn't. He told me straight up: "I would never claim to be a world-class game designer." What he's spent thirty years building instead is something almost nobody talks about: the ability to sit between two people who don't understand each other and make a deal happen anyway.Jay started as an English Literature major with zero interest in games as a career —

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01:37:13

Dev to Dev S03 E01 - Steven Dwyer

Dev to Dev ·

2026/09/07

Dev to Dev is back and this first episode of Season 03 is a bit special for me — Steven and I go back, and it was great getting to sit down and finally hear the whole story, not just the bits I already knew.What gets me about Steven's career is how little of it he actually planned. He failed his way out of a computer science degree at Glasgow, and it was his Mum who pushed him toward Abertay's games course — one of only two in the world at the time. He burned out hard on his first industry job in

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01:04:02

Dev to Dev S01 Theme - Leap First

Dev to Dev ·

2026/08/31

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

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01:00:02

Dev to Dev S01 E13 - Zane Draper (REMASTERED)

Dev to Dev ·

2026/08/24

Ahoy folks. This week I’m pulling another excellent episode from the Season 01 archive for a Dev to Dev revisit, because it's one I still think about a lot. Zane Draper and I worked together for a couple of years before our project at Zenimax Online Studios was shut down, and this conversation is a good reminder of why he was always so unbothered by whatever got thrown at him.We get into how a traded set of toy cars turned into a genuine obsession with Pokémon Yellow, how he stumbled sideways out of

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00:36:06

Dev to Dev S02 Theme - What it Costs

Dev to Dev ·

2026/08/18

Hey everyone — this one's personal. I pulled four clips from Season 02 that all circle the same uncomfortable truth: loving this industry doesn't mean it loves you back in equal measure.What struck me pulling these together is how differently that cost shows up. Sometimes it's your body clocking out before your mind is ready to admit something's wrong. Sometimes it's the strange blankness of a day with nothing built into it anymore. Sometimes it's just holding on long enough for the people around

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01:01:15

Dev to Dev S01 E15 - Bill Mueller (REMASTERED)

Dev to Dev ·

2026/08/09

Here’s another excellent episode from the Season 01 archives of Dev to Dev. I've known Bill a long time, but this conversation still surprised me. I learned things about his path I never knew — like the fact that he almost became a music teacher, or that he got his ZeniMax job offer literally while his wife was in labor.Highlights:His origin story starts with a Commodore 64, a Nintendo obsession, and a moment at Disney on Ice that quietly rewired how he saw entertainmentWhy Bioshock made him walk

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01:02:16

Dev to Dev S01 E11 - Landon Hood (REMASTERED)

Dev to Dev ·

2026/08/02

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

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00:15:47

Dev to Dev S02 Theme - Family

Dev to Dev ·

2026/07/26

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!Highlights:Leyla Lacombe on how her dad's love of tech became her love of games — and how

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00:13:42

Dev to Dev S02 Wrap Up

Dev to Dev ·

2026/07/20

Season Two's Done — Here's What Stuck With MeTwenty 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 recordA 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

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00:55:18

Dev to Dev S02 E20 - Luke Shingleton

Dev to Dev ·

2026/07/16

APOLOGIES FOR THE DELAY!! Had some scheduling and technical snafu's!!! But we are back!!Some days, life just decides to throw two enormous things at you at once — and this episode is proof of that.Luke Shingleton is a Quest Designer at Double Eleven, and when we sat down together it turned out we had more in common than either of us expected: only children, small towns, and lives that kept nudging us toward this weird, wonderful industry.But the story that got me was this — Luke had a job interview

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01:00:14

Dev to Dev S02 E19 - Tyler Rotheram

Dev to Dev ·

2026/07/05

I love episodes like this one. Tyler Rotheram's story isn't about talent discovered — it's about someone who kept putting himself in rooms he wasn't initially invited to, and made his talent impossible to ignore once he was there.We talked about growing up surrounded by a gamer family, running an accidentally-massive Just Dance club at sixth form, and the sheer nerve of a 17-year-old walking up to Lucid Games and asking to come in and help. That same nerve got him a QA job at PlayStation on his 18th

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00:57:31

Dev to Dev S02 E18 - Scott Nisenfeld

Dev to Dev ·

2026/06/28

This one’s for anyone who’s ever wondered who actually makes the gears turn inside a game.Scott Nisenfeld has spent nearly twenty years as a gameplay engineer, and his story is one of my favourites precisely because it isn’t a highlight reel. He fell for games through King’s Quest, but it was the machinery under the hood that really got him — the kind of kid who’d read a board-game rulebook for fun just to figure out how it ticked.We talked about the side-door route into the industry (four years of

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00:57:59

Dev to Dev S02 E17 - Sangita Nuli

Dev to Dev ·

2026/06/22

This one's a good reminder that there's no single road into games. Sangita Nuli came in through plays, film and TV scripts, and a talent agency video games desk — and for years Sangita was convinced making games was simply out of reach. The technology was scary. The interactivity was even scarier. Then Sangita stopped waiting and jumped.What I loved about this conversation is how clearly Sangita’s old life feeds the new one. Reading twenty scripts a week and learning to sell what's good in them

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00:57:11

Dev to Dev S02 E16 - Louis Bayard

Dev to Dev ·

2026/06/14

WE'RE BACK!!! Thank you for your patience over the last couple of weeks. I'm excited to get things rolling again and this week I sat down with Louis Bayard, and honestly it turned into one of those conversations that made me rethink how I approach my own career.Louis is a level designer — Codemasters first, on Grid Legends and WRC, and now at Third Kind Games on their open-world mountain bike game Maverix. But the thing that stuck with me wasn't the games. It was his complete refusal to overthink

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00:00:46

Dev to Dev S02 - Intermission (Again!)

Dev to Dev ·

2026/06/07

Ahoy friends. Again apologies but no new episode of Dev to Dev this week due to work and travel commitments.Thank you for your patience and we'll be back next Monday 15th with Season 02 Episode 16!!Find the Podcast at:SpotifyPatreon⁠RSS⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠Bluesky⁠Threads⁠YouTube⁠⁠Blog⁠Email: DevToDevPodcast@Gmail.com

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00:03:56

Dev to Dev S02 - Intermission

Dev to Dev ·

2026/05/31

Howdy folks, apologies but due to some work and travel commitments there's no new episode of Dev to Dev this week. We will be back on June 15th with Season 02 Episode 16 but in the meantime thank you for your patience!Find the Podcast at:SpotifyPatreon⁠RSS⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠Bluesky⁠Threads⁠YouTube⁠⁠Blog⁠Email: DevToDevPodcast@Gmail.com

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