Introducing Wayfinder!

Alright pals, we have a new member of the team joining us! Everyone welcome Wayfinder!

Who are you, what is your role within TTG, and when did you start playing The Tower? 

Hey, I'm Luke (or Wayfinder), and I'm the new Live Ops Designer on The Tower. That's basically just a Game Designer that focuses on new content and content focused features in an active, live operations title like this. I've got about 6 years of experience in Game Design, most recently at EA Capital Games and Riot, and a number of years in the professional esports scene. I started playing The Tower casually a few months before the job listing went up actually -- a good friend of mine was playing it at the bar and recommended I download. 

What kind of player are you when you’re not designing? Optimizer, chaos gremlin, collector, etc.? 

I tend to be a bit of an explorer in my gaming habits, trying new things and wanting to experience everything the game has to offer versus pure optimization. That said, I do have a competitive side, I just want to beat challenges in a fun, unique way when possible (more of a Johnny than a Timmy, for those of you who've read Mark Rosewater's famous blog on MTG player types). A few of my favorite games are Hearthstone, Dota 2, and Life is Strange: Before the Storm (though I love the whole franchise). 

If you could describe your approach to Live Ops in three words, what would they be? 

Measured, iterative collaboration. 

What excites you most about working on a game like ours? 

The Tower has a lot of room to grow, and I think there are a lot of interesting ways to keep offering long term and newer players more ways to engage with the mechanics they've grown to love. With my background in RPG and CCG design, I'm hoping we can maintain the core identity of the game while offering some new ways to challenge and inspire players. 

If players break something in a way you didn’t expect, are you impressed, concerned, or taking notes? 

Definitely taking notes. As a longtime Dota player, I appreciate when unintended mechanics become a core part of the skill of playing a game; that said, we obviously need to make sure that what we put out is meeting the players' and devs' needs for the game. If an emergent mechanic doesn't work quite like I intended, but it's still largely meeting our vision and the players seem to enjoy it, I prefer to embrace the "happy little accident." Plus, no one likes a hotfix, so I avoid those whenever possiblesweats under the producer's piercing gaze.

Thanks for taking the time to get to know me a little bit. I'm sure I'll see you around the community.