In Master of the Game, we meet the experts behind Gameloft's games to share the knowledge, perspectives, and practical lessons they've gained throughout their careers.
We spoke with Dazia Pineda, Senior Producer at Gameloft Barcelona, whose career has taken her across studios and countries, leading teams and shipping games while mentoring the next generation of game developers.
Discover her perspective on production, leadership, and the habits that help keep game development on track.
Q1 — What's a decision in your field that seems small but can have a huge impact on the player experience?
Prioritization. It sounds like project management basics, but it's actually one of the highest-stakes decisions you make. We'd all love every feature, every fix, every polish pass to be perfect, but perfection across the board isn't realistic with real deadlines and real resources. So deciding what gets fixed now, what gets deprioritized, and what gets sunset because it's not performing as expected, that's the decision that quietly shapes the whole player experience. It seems small because it's often just a line item in a backlog. But get it wrong, fix the wrong bug, polish the wrong feature, keep something alive too long that isn't working, and players feel it immediately, even if they can't articulate why.
Q2 — What's something people think makes a great game that actually matters less than they expect?
Raw feature quantity. Sometimes having more content, more systems, more mechanics can seem like it makes a game "better." But a smaller set of well-polished, well-integrated features almost always beats a sprawling list of half-finished ones. Less is more.
Q3 — In your job, what's something that matters more than people expect?
Communication. Not just having a process, but making sure updates, blockers, and decisions reach the right people at the right time, in a format they'll actually absorb. A tracker or status doc means nothing if nobody reads it or if it's updated inconsistently.
Q4 — What's one lesson you've learned that completely changed the way you work?
Several years ago, while working on Spider-Man Unlimited, I had to make a tough call: lower the visual quality in certain areas so the game would still look good, but run well on hardware that simply wasn't as powerful as other platforms. It came down to a choice between players having a smooth, playable experience versus chasing visual perfection. We went with performance, even if that meant fewer VFXs or less polished-looking assets. That decision taught me that flagging a risk early, even an uncomfortable one, always costs less than staying quiet and hoping it resolves itself. If we had waited, hoping the hardware limitations would somehow work themselves out or that players wouldn't notice, we would have shipped a worse experience with no time left to fix it. Raising it early gave us the room to actually solve the problem instead of just reacting to it. Since then, I approach every project the same way: identify the risk as soon as possible, even if it means delivering unwelcome news, so there's still time for a Plan B, a Plan C, or further down the alphabet if needed.
Q5 — Finally, which are your 5 steps to make production stay under control:
- Build psychological safety so problems surface early!
- It is important to create an environment where everyone flag blockers or scope concerns immediately, not two weeks before the deadline. If people are afraid to say "this is behind" or "this won't work," you lose your early-warning system entirely.
- Match assignments to strengths and bandwidth.
- Knowing your team well enough is key to avoid overloading someone or misassigning work that sets them up to fail. Leads are your guides here.
- Define scope and success criteria before work starts.
- Lock requirements and "done" criteria upfront. Most production chaos traces back to ambiguity here, not poor execution.
- Protect scope with a change-control process.
- Every new request gets evaluated for timeline/resource impact before it's approved. This is what actually stops scope creep instead of just complaining about it after the fact.
- Run a single source of truth with regular checkpoints.
- A shared tracker plus recurring check-ins (standups, weekly reviews) with a clear escalation path. Break production into milestones so slippage is visible while it's still cheap to fix.
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