Welcome to Design Sync

When I was first starting out as a game designer, I struggled to find anything online about how designers actually worked on a day-to-day basis. I'd already spent five years in game design-related courses that taught me the what and why — but the how always felt a little too high-level.

Even after working in a studio, I continued to notice the same gap—the space between design theory and production realities where intermediate and advanced designers live. Sure, there's no shortage of content out there on game design — but most of it lives at the extremes: beginner tutorials like 'How to design a jump mechanic,' and polished postmortems such as 'How we designed our GOTY combat system'. These are useful, but they leave out something critical: the real, messy, iterative, compromise-filled work that experienced designers actually do, and the challenges they face.

Knowledge sharing in this space is thin. Maybe it's due to studio secrecy. Maybe it's gatekeeping. Either way: screw that. Let's build up the next generation of designers, and make some kick-ass games.

If you've ever felt good about a design doc, then got a Slack from an engineer that starts with "Quick question…" and ends with three paragraphs — you're in the right place.

This is for game designers who live in the in-between — that space where ideas collide with production, and vision gets reshaped by reality. It's a space for systems thinkers, pragmatists, and team players — the designers who want to build things that actually ship.

Where the abstract becomes concrete, and clarity becomes currency. The missing middle.

That's what Design Sync is here to explore.

🛠️ What You'll Find Here

Design Sync lives at the intersection of design craft and production reality. It’s built for designers who want to:

• Write specs that developers can build from
• Break down ideas into actionable, sprint-ready tasks
• Communicate trade-offs, not just pitch visions
• Go beyond vague advice to grounded, real-world examples

Each post will aim to balance clarity and execution. Whether it's deconstructing how a game handled player onboarding, or turning a progression system into dev-ready specs, you'll get a lens grounded in what designers actually do.

👤 Who This Is For

• Mid to senior designers looking to sharpen production-side skills
• Aspiring leads who want to build trust with engineers and producers
• Indie devs wearing the “designer” hat for the first time
• Anyone tired of theory that doesn’t ship

🔄 Why “Sync”?

Because this is what design really is:

Syncing vision with constraints.
Syncing ideas with schedules.
Syncing creative goals with the reality of what your team can build.

It’s not about compromising your values — it’s about expressing them in ways that work.

🚀 What’s Next

The first series will walk through how to turn a design spec into a sprint plan — including templates, examples, and breakdowns of the thought process behind each step.

Future topics include:

• Deconstructing real-world systems with a production lens
• Tools and frameworks to structure design work
• How to get buy-in across disciplines
• When to let go of a “cool idea” (and how to recover like a champ)

If any of that resonates, hit subscribe and let’s dive in. This is a conversation I’ve wanted to have for a long time — and I’m excited to finally sync up.