Game Design Meetup #5 — Micro-Talks

Ricky Abu Siddek and I hosted the fifth meetup on a Thursday evening, and I left with my head full of things to think about. Ludvig Swedberg and Game Town made the space feel welcoming as always, and we ran another round of micro-talks with three designers.

Marlène Delrive talked about designing around a feeling: her game about Alzheimer's was built around one goal, make players feel forgetful instead of watching it happen to someone else. A coffee cup disappearing while it brews hit harder than any scripted cutscene could. Overdo it, though, and players stop noticing entirely. Restraint is the actual skill, and finding the feeling first is what shapes every decision after.

Matt Woodward talked about why this stuff is hard, introducing the idea of liminal novelty: good design lives at the edges of what players already know, an unexpected twist on a familiar pattern rather than something wholly new. He was blunt that nobody has this figured out, not junior devs, not big studios, and framed that as good news. The field is more level than it looks. Best practices exist, but they're not a formula: take in advice, test it, keep what works for you.

Guillermo Valerdi Chalate has spent twenty years moving between architecture, filmmaking and game design, often several at once. As teams shrink and more work goes freelance, the people who can cross disciplines are the ones who stay in the room. His closing question has stuck with me since: what's your reaction to this moment for the medium, and will you help decide what comes next? Those years across different fields aren't a detour. They're something you keep building on.

This is exactly why Ricky and I keep doing these. The conversations that send you home rethinking how you actually work.

If you're a designer around Stockholm, Graham Hill is running a Level Design Jam in July worth checking out: lnkd.in/dXUWFP8x.