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 applying the wrong way), the grad-school professor who nearly put him off for good, and the eight-month crunch on a Command & Conquer expansion that senior staff called the worst project of their lives. We also got into the harder stuff — cancelled projects, a layoff that took his whole team, and what it does to your sense of self when the thing you love is suddenly gone.

Highlights:

Why he believes the heart of a game is the part you can’t see
The presence experiment that pulled him out of academia
Building tools so designers and players can do things he never could
The multi-turret tank feature, and the designer who asked for “a turret on top of a turret”
His honest, grounded take on AI in game development
What “I had a hand in that” really means to him

It’s a thoughtful, generous conversation about doing the invisible work and being okay with it. Give it a listen — I think you’ll come away seeing the credits sequence a little differently.

Find the Podcast at:

Find Scott At:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottnisenfeld/