WE'RE BACK!!! Thank you for your patience over the last couple of weeks. I'm excited to get things rolling again and this week I sat down with Louis Bayard, and honestly it turned into one of those conversations that made me rethink how I approach my own career.

Louis is a level designer — Codemasters first, on Grid Legends and WRC, and now at Third Kind Games on their open-world mountain bike game Maverix. But the thing that stuck with me wasn't the games. It was his complete refusal to overthink. He moved from France to England on a single yes, with no friends and no furniture, and just figured it out. He calls that instinct a flaw. I spent some of the episode trying to convince him it's a superpower!

What I loved is how honest he is about the cost of it — the worry, the “have I done a good job?” — and how he's grown into a calmer version of the same thing: letting the path show itself instead of forcing it.

Highlights:

• Why his design school banned game engines for the entire first year
• Building real WRC rally stages by eye from Google Earth and GoPro footage
• Going from a 15-person team to being the only level designer on a whole game
• Why he'd be a therapist if he wasn't making games
• The horror racing game living rent-free in his head

Go give it a listen — I think Louis's "jump first" philosophy might be exactly what some of you needed to hear this week.

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