Deathloop's Dinga Bakaba on rising to director and avoiding crunch

gamesindustry.biz:

James Batchelor

Editor-in-Chief

Thursday 17th March 2022

Dinga Bakaba's road into the industry was, in his own words, "very chaotic."

Despite his love of video games, as well as board games and tabletop RPGs, a job as a developer seemed inaccessible due to his lack of skills in mathematics and art. He gave up hope of entering the games industry, until he heard a term that was new to him: game design.

"In most French articles in magazines, people would only talk about the developers and the programmers, but the term 'game design' was not frequent at all," he explains.

"When I came across this term, I Wikipedia'd it immediately and that clicked. The role of establishing the rules and tweaking them and basically making the game part of a game appealed to me immediately."

Dinga Bakaba, Arkane Lyon

All the time he had spent modding board games, experimenting with level editors on titles like Tony Hawk, and serving as dungeon master when playing RPGs gave him a foundation to build on. His ability to read English opened up new avenues to learn about the discipline of game design.

"There were no French books on it," he says, "so I was lucky to access English and read a lot of blogs and websites, especially sites about the industry, learning for myself what I could not learn at school."

In fact, he dropped out of school as he sought a way into the industry -- a path that would eventually lead him to become studio director of Arkane and into an award-winning career, including the Develop Star Award at this year's Develop:Brighton.

Becoming a father at 22 increased the pressure for a steady income, and he eventually got a QA role at a mobile games studio in the feature-phone era. He later secured an internship in game design, and then