Levelling The Playing Field

Welcome to Levelling The Playing Field- a recurring game development advice newsletter about design, development, production, marketing, and business.

Hi, my name is…

Hi, my name is Rami Ismail, a Dutch/Egyptian game developer & industry consultant. I have spent the past decade of my life making games while finding ways to make the games industry more fair to aspiring developers all around the world.

My career has been a pretty overwhelming one - in 2010 I started my own games studio, Vlambeer, as a pair of school dropouts. Vlambeer rapidly became a household indie name, and my efforts to promote it accidentally kicked off a public speaking career that continues to this day. My public speaking rapidly got very popular, and then got me traveling the globe. That led to me meeting an uncountable amount of interesting game developers doing incredible work, and industry veterans with inexhaustible industry knowledge.

A large part of game development is experience - as is the truth for any craft - and there’s no shortcut for experience.

I believe the games industry remains too opaque, too secretive, too vague - and the obvious solution is democratized access to knowledge and perspective. To that end, I’ve been offering cheap and affordable consultancy over at book.ramiismail.com since late last year. I’ve helped thousands of developers - and noticed very quickly that some questions kept repeating: while details would vary, developers kept getting stuck in the exact same situations. I realized that there must be a better way to share the repeatable advice that helps these team, to make my participation in assisting these apparently very common issues obsolete - allowing me to focus my consultancy on more complicated situation, or personalized advice.

Levelling The Playing Field

Levelling The Playing Field is a newsletter that is free - supported only by people who choose to support it - and will occasionally send you one short article with a lesson about the design, development, marketing, or business of games. Every article will conclude with three actionable exercises to apply to your own work or thinking. My hope is that each of them will give you more context and insight into your craft.

A large part of game development is experience - as is the truth for any creative or entrepreneurial work - and there’s no shortcut for experience. The articles on Levelling The Playing Field aren’t meant to replace experience. It is meant to share what I’ve learned from the very best people in games, to bring you into industry conversations I was privileged to listen in on, and to give you additional information to make the complex choices that you're faced with while making games.

The first newsletter of LTPF goes out on Monday, and is a simple exercise to help you identify the core of your games’ design. If you want to stay up to date, subscribe to the newsletter for free. If you want to support my efforts, subscribe for a small monthly fee, or make a larger donation.

Either way, let’s get to talking about making games.