Joe Ryan

Back in 2014, there was a lane-pushing game that blended League of Legends with the design thinking behind Heroes of the Storm — one of very few games which have done so.

If you haven't heard of TOME: Immortal Arena, now is a great time to learn about it — through this enriching conversation I shared with its lead designer Joe Ryan!

---

Hey Sean! I'm just excited to have the opportunity to wax philosophical on a genre that's near and dear to me, both personally and professionally. It's not something I've had the opportunity to work on for the last eight years, give or take, but it's still a pretty fundamental part of my existence.

I didn't realize that until I started working on one for the first time… when people were talking about how they used to play DotA and I was like, “I was playing DotA back on the Westfall tileset!” I used to play Aeon of Strife, in StarCraft, and I was like, “oh shit!”

Yeah, there is this whole history there.

My history with the video games industry started when I was hired as a raid tester for a World of Warcraft Classic.

That was shortly before they released the Naxxramas expansion. Early raid content had an occasional catastrophic bug, unbeatable fights (or a single unbeatable fight, mathematically proven), those kinds of things.

That happened before they made this initiative to have 40 in-house testers, hired out of experienced raiding guilds.

So that was my “in” to the industry — dropping out of seventh grade and playing way too many MMOs until I got an opportunity! I don't recommend that path to anyone else who hopes to pursue video games — it should not have worked out.

From there I started working on a game called Starcraft 2, in QA. That transferred into an Associate Technical Designer position on Starcraft 2, where I started learning the nuts and bolts of design.

In retrospect, it was very much tailored towards the RTS methodology, for perhaps obvious reasons. If you're working on an RTS, a lot of the design subtleties that you pick up on and are casually mentioned, are RTS related. And since the progenitors of the lane pushing genre happened from an RTS, they've always been intrinsically linked.

Fun fact about the philosophical history of the genre — I love how much of it is actually because of the mechanics that existed in Warcraft 3!

There were limitations of the Warcraft 3 engine that modders had to include or attempt to work around. And now they're assumed parts of the genre, “oh, it has to work this way”. It's always worked its way, but it only worked that way because Warcraft 3 worked that way.

During that period of time, I also worked on Heroes of the Storm when it was in pre-production. At the time it was “Blizzard Allstars”, which was a much better name, frankly.

So that was the first MOBA I ever worked on: the really, really early prototyping phases of Heroes of the Storm. That's where a lot of my philosophy for how to design MOBAs came from.

There's a funny anecdote that my father likes to bring up every time we end up talking.

Apparently when I was 10 or 11 years old, I sat down and I watched some cinematic for some Blizzard, RTS game. And I turned to him and I said: “I'm gonna work for them.”

He remembers telling me something to the effect of: “stay in school, do your best, you can do it, just believe in your dreams!” But he candidly tells me now, he remembers thinking: “not a chance buddy!”

So it is kind of funny. Yes, it was an interesting, lovely experience, honestly.

After six years working at Blizzard, I was laid off. I was part of the 2012 layoffs. I think they called them “the 600” at the time or something.

Fortunately or otherwise, I had already been interviewing around.

After six years of being there, it was starting to settle in… “this person has been here for 15 years, and that person's been there for 17 years, and Samwise works down the hall, he's been here forever… and in 10 years I will have been here for 16 years, and that person will have been here for 26 years, and Samwise will still be down the hall.”

It just didn't really seem like there was much of an opportunity for me to stretch my wings and fail if I remained there.

So that was the impetus — I was looking for work, and two friends of mine who had formerly been on the Starcraft team and left for their own reasons, were working at a company in the Bay Area called KIXEYE.

They recommended: “Hey! You should come check this place out. They really do need some more experienced designers on staff.”

It was a company that at the time was a couple hundred people, and the only two people doing any kind of game design were two of the co-founders. My friends said: “since they have this need, why not come and apply?”

So I did. And it turns out it was a fortuitous timing. I ended up working on a game called Battle Pirates, which was also an RTS, strictly speaking, but also not.

It was that era of free-to-play gaming on Facebook; Flash games; not really the Wild West but it was pretty close to it. The games industry started exploding; there was just so much more access to an entire new market of people that traditionally weren't much of game players.

KIXEYE at the time was also working on a MOBA. They wanted to make a AAA-quality experience that could run in a web browser.

That was their primary goal. And because it was a MOBA and they could benefit from experienced design, leadership and familiarity with the genre, they asked: “would you have any interest in doing this?”

And I did.

It definitely did evolve over time, I can tell you that much right now. In fact, it never stopped evolving right up until it stopped living.

The original vision for TOME was something I kind of hate about game development, both as an occasional necessity (I recognize nowadays), but also as one of the reasons many games go astray during development, I think, which is when the goal is "to be as different as possible".

The game stayed within the definition of an RTS-style, lane-pushing game, isometric camera, mouse control of a character, all that fun stuff. But other than that, they were trying to be as different from… I believe League of Legends was their target, for perhaps obvious reasons at the time.

That led to a game that just didn't really feel good. I don't know how else to explain it.

They were trying to be so different, for example, that they were looking for completely asymmetrical maps. Throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Instead of having your standard symmetry, whether axial, rotational…. it was drawing lines on a map.

They were just like, okay, do this, do this, do this, that's the layout for our map! Let's see how this plays.

On one hand I appreciate that “Silicon Valley, just do it, fail fast” spirit. But on the other hand, it really does feel like the definition of reinventing the wheel. Eventually you're gonna come to a symmetric circle, more or less.

So why not start somewhere closer to what we know works and step backwards if you want to go in a different direction?

The character design was similarly unrestrained. At that time, the characters for the game were being designed purely off of concept art. We throw a person's name, like Ken or Clark, at a picture, and then figure out what that kind of person would do. Again, there's a lot of beauty in that style of unconstrained process but it’s unlikely to yield success.

That brings us to the second part of your question, which was “how did the philosophy shift over time?”

I think that was probably the first big shift — as soon as they made the horrible mistake of giving me any kind of authority over the game's design direction. I killed that unconstrained creativity.

In retrospect, there is a phrase from another designer who I had the privilege of working with once upon a time which is, to paraphrase, “creativity happens inside constraints”.

To me “you can't paint without a canvas”, is my personal spin on this concept. So that was where we started: let's pare this down to the bare bones. Let's distil it, rather than try to brew it from scratch.

I think that was very heavily influenced by my time with Heroes of the Storm and seeing, especially at the time, much more veteran designers work and how they approached the concept of an RTS or a MOBA.

That was also the goal for HotS — to reduce first, right? Take away from what everyone thinks works.

We have our theories on some things that do work and some things that don't. Some of the things that exist in the genre only exist because Warcraft 3 worked that way and there was no way around it at the time.

Last hitting and denying minions, for example. Denying minions was absolutely removed from League in an effort to make it more approachable, and not really lower the skill ceiling per se, but definitely give better information on why you're not doing well.

League left last hitting in, though, and I disagree with that to a level; I recognize where it fits in certain examples of the genre, but it detracts from pushing the lane.

That was the approach! Start with League, and then do to League what League did to DotA. Simplify even further. Reduce a lot of the systems that people think have to be there, and a lot of the things that people believe add value.

There were some… they weren't necessarily major off the top of my head. I'm sure if you were talking to the engineering director, you would get some more juicy information there!

From a design standpoint, there were a couple of quirks that we had to work around. The first was that the Escape Key is a no-no key. But it’s also the default “menu bringer-upper” if you will.

It was mostly little things like that. As well as making sure that at the time Unity could… because originally TOME was actually also built in Flash, and that was, ooh boy, I'm real glad we made the switch to C# and the C++ combat server and everything else in Unity as a development platform, even though it was pretty rough back then.

But, as far as game design considerations for web? I don't think there were too many. Web was more of a product and marketing play than a design play. The goal was to present a AAA experience in web, and most of the constraints that came with that vision weren't design ones. Our artists and programmers shouldered most of that burden; they’re the real heroes.

Almost certainly. One of the concepts that we toyed around with early on during the HotS prototyping was the idea of jungle minions not being buff sources, and instead the camps you captured would send minions down the lane.

I believe there are some maps in HotS where you see that functionality, which they leaned very hard into with each map having its own unique map mechanics.

I don't remember exactly which TOME map had this… for context there were three TOME maps. We initially went live with the 3v3, which is the one I'm pretty sure 95% of the games that were ever played were played on. We did release a 5v5 map, and there was actually a really crazy fun 7v7 that was in prototyping and never even saw the light of day.

But anyway, there was at least something that made its way to TOME from that. It might have been “kill a monster and your minions have an attack and movement speed buff for 30 seconds” or something.

However, you win by pushing the lane! And there's all of these other design elements in play that can create some very interesting friction with the goal of pushing the lane, because otherwise it can feel a little too samey — but I don't necessarily think they need to be as divorced from the concept of pushing a lane as it can be in DotA or League.

The jungle game in League is essentially a designed game in its own right. It's an entirely secondary thing that's played by two players most of the time, and then the lane-pushing element is only felt whenever that player decides to try make an impact on the lane.

Don't get me wrong, it has value in a very strategic sense, but it's essentially two separate paths of play that occasionally overlap. To me, that wasn't quite reductive enough.

Speaking of reduction, TOME originally had no items! I got talked into, by basically everyone actually, putting some kind of items into TOME. I would consider our approach on items as originating from HotS DNA on some level.

Because if you don't need it, you don't need it. Especially in the prototyping phase.

Reductive design starts with removing everything that you think won't harm the core of the game. If it doesn't harm the core of the game, what you've actually done is free up canvas space to paint something else.

You can put anything you want there. You can put the same thing back if its absence is felt, or you could put your own spin on the same thing, and that’s ultimately what ended up happening with the items in TOME.

For a small piece of additional context, the item game in TOME was also quite simplified. All of those items are percentile stat boosts. The health items give percentage health, the might items give you percentage might (which is both attack damage and ability power), and attack speed items gave percentage attack speed.

There were three tiers of each item, so you could buy the health item, 5% health, upgrade it into 10% health, and then you had the choice at the end of it — the final upgrade added a unique mechanic to that item for your character.

So there was still a meaningful series of decision points in the item game, there were build choices, and every purchase made impactful swings in power.

They do. But when your game can be over, in a genuinely satisfying way (at least for the people who enjoyed the experience) in five minutes, progression becomes its own enemy sometimes.

There is an interesting point here, perhaps. In my mind there's a lot of desire for rubber-banding mechanics in MOBAs. That was explicitly not part of TOME.

Strictly speaking, tower ammunition punishes you for failing — it's very much a “rich get richer, poor get poorer” kind of a thing, but that was intentional, by design, from the very get-go.

There's a fundamental belief I have, and certainly had in those days, that losing a game isn't the problem. Losing a game that you know you're gonna lose — and then it takes 50 more minutes to lose? That's the problem.

That's when the concept of “my time was wasted” comes into play, which is where concession comes in. Like, an actual system to quit a game is absurd! Especially when it's, in my opinion, a by-product of the game system itself. It’s like game designers self-reporting their own poor choices or something.

The design of the game itself is saying, “oh, it has to take at least 50 minutes because we don't want power to be too swingy, and we want it to feel fair most of the time, and we want people to have a chance to come back. Oh, and also we have this huge progression system, so we need to justify that progression system which means if the whole thing is done in three minutes — was it satisfying progression? No!”

That's where all those problems stem from.

Removing that concept of “this game needs to take a long time” is why progression was a tricky thing to fold into TOME, I suppose. That was where a lot of the design simplifications came from: attempting to treat it more as chess than Dota.

We targeted our audience very well from a design standpoint, from a vision standpoint. The people that we were trying to make happy with TOME are the people that still played League every day, but don't enjoy League. That's it.

We were looking to provide the experience that they actually wanted, and therefore removing the things that made their experience with League unpleasant. We learned that works really well; some players really wanted that.

I remember, and there's a little bit of selection and confirmation bias going on here, mind you, but I remember one very specific steam review to this day, which essentially said, “I didn't realize how much I didn't enjoy playing League until I played this game”. And I was like, “oh my God, that's really cool!”

That was the common sentiment found amongst a lot of the positive reviews. Of course, there were many negative reviews, don't get me wrong; Largely around the game not having enough perceived depth when compared to more robust lane pushing games. Makes sense!

A lot of the positive reviews, however, are based around “this takes me 5–10 minutes and I get as much or more of a feeling of a successful League match”, or “oh my God, I wish other games would do this”, or “I went back to try and play Dota and really miss out of combat healing.”

Yes — that's why those mechanics are there. It's my fundamental belief that you get what players actually want when you listen to the core heartbeat of the genre.

That only applies, mind you, without going too far into mutations, and third-person, and SMITE. Once you choose a few fundamental divergences it becomes harder to hear the core heartbeat. Brutal Legend is one of the weird third person lane-pushing games…

It’s a third person action game with tower defence components. It's a pretty fun one, especially if you have any love of metal or Tim Schaffer and Double Fine’s games. Jack Black does voice acting!

Don't go into it expecting like a fantastic lane pushing experience, but I think it’s a blast. You’ll see 2009’s idea of what a lane-pushing mutation could be, I suppose.

League hadn't been out that long, but Dota had been out forever and a lot of players who play League are originally Dota players, or at least very quickly kind of ingratiated themselves into that culture.

Also, by the time TOME was in beta, League had been live for four or five years? Wow. Yeah, it both sounds weirdly short and also feels like an eternity. It was just a very stressful time, I suppose. You just made me feel old. Thanks for that.

There was an idea in my head at the time, because I had seen so many games attempt to kill WoW — the goal for TOME wasn't to kill League.

The intention was to surface what players actually like about that game. I remember playing quite a bit of League, especially during the HotS development days, and of course during the TOME days when we're trying to teach the whole team how to play this genre.

There’s no substitute for playing… not your competitor, and not your spiritual predecessor, but both in a way. Anyways, even in that time, the frustrations were there in League! People did not enjoy 50 minute matches, did not enjoy this, that, or the other.

Nowadays, “jungle diff” or whatever is basically a ubiquitous meme. But at that time it was still a concept. People were like, “yeah, I had a 40 minute game, but our top lane sucked”. “The four of us queued together and our support was bad, so we lost”, those are just part of that game. For better or for worse. I say for worse.

This problem is actually exacerbated by having too much reward for individual performance. You mentioned not seeing last hitting in TOME, but it goes much further: all experience and gold rewards are split evenly to any hero in range. Towers provided global rewards to the entire team.

It was really rare for players on a team to have a huge power delta compared to their own team, and so it was less common for folks to underperform and earn the ire of their team.

When systems which simultaneously reward individual performance, and effectively punish unity of the team are part of your game, and you have millions of players playing millions of games every day, those blemishes surface very quickly, even for the average player, I suspect.

I was there! I had a very fun time being there.

I remember getting… oh, not only do I remember — somewhere, if not in this current house, then in storage in San Francisco, is the award we got at PAX, which was my favourite award! We got an award for “most intuitive controls”.

Right? The pleasant way of taking it, in my opinion, was someone said: “oh hey, this game's actually pretty cool and we like it. What kind of award can we give them? How about most intuitive controls?”

And I was like, “Thanks man. I respect that. That means a lot.” Somebody liked us enough to force-feed us an award! That was fun.

Watching people that weren't team members play the game live is always a magical experience. To actually see it in a game that was closer to me, not trying to sound arrogant, but that I had more of an impact in directly, was a very magical experience.

It was my first baby too. And all of the mistakes that come along with it, you know, dents in the head and weird allergies and all.

Hmm. I almost wanna say “no”. Being overtly surprised by TOME wasn’t the intention from the get-go, right?

Earlier I talked about the initial philosophy of the game being “do everything differently”, and then we shifted to “everything the same, but stop doing bad things”. So I don't think anyone familiar with the lane pushing genre would find anything in TOME surprising.

The surprise came when they went back to their, at that point historically preferred game, and realized, “oh shit, it doesn't have the same lustre”. That would be the most surprising thing, when they found out that playing TOME poisoned their concept of other games.

Some of my personal favourite moments working on the game had very little to do with the game!

They had more to do with being a terrible lead, and being just a good enough lead in very particular ways that the people I was leading were willing to say, “hey, you're a terrible lead — here's why.” And me being able to say, “oh, shit, they’re right” and then becoming a better lead.

Those kind of things stick out to me more. Maybe it's because of how long it was ago at this point, almost a decade.

PAX was an extreme highlight. On a personal level, that was the closest to being at BlizzCon and watching people play Starcraft 2 before it comes out.

You're like, “oh my God, look at the joy on all these humans! Look at it! Is this what we do? Is this what we do as game designers? Make people this happy? That's incredible.”

There were a lot of tiny favourite parts. There were people on the team who didn't like the game, but month over month, build over build, would suddenly find themselves loving it and stealing opportunities in the day to playtest as opposed to do some menial chore that could absolutely wait.

There is a fun anecdote where three of our executive team members at the company, for a very real period of time, were spending the vast majority of their office hours playing TOME once it went into beta. If they weren't in a meeting, they were teaming up and just crushing noobs.

That was kind of funny to me in the back of my mind! Our CEO and CMO and one of the founders… all they do is play our game. That's cool.

That was definitely an inflection point in development, when your product reviews go from extreme scrutiny of “business and business and business” to extreme scrutiny from a hardcore player who just also happens to sign your pay-cheques. It's a weird thing to experience.

You are correct — most of the people on the team had never worked on a MOBA. Many of them had never worked on an RTS.

Some of our more experienced art leads came from Diablo. While you're still essentially designing and modelling and animating characters in a way that you're familiar with, the gameplay constraints of MOBAs are very different.

If my character has to stop for an animation for longer than 0.2 seconds, you are stunning my character every time I do something! We can't have that.

Responsiveness is so crucial, and that really does change the way that animators have to think. It was really apparent to them when they played the game themselves though. Easier to show than tell. Everyone feels unresponsiveness.

At one point in our development, we did hire someone who had quite a bit of experience working on MOBAs. We hired them from Riot support, into a design role. So there was someone who had an extreme opinion of how MOBAs should work, of course based purely on their own experiences with League.

Therefore everything we were trying to do to distance ourselves and poison people's opinions of League when they go back to play it… was the antithesis of good lane-pushing design from that person’s perspective. That was an interesting leadership experience, yet another failure as a lead on my part.

That coincides with something I was reminiscing about earlier. This is on one hand arrogant... I'm not sure I would recommend it to people who are taking their first role as a design lead, because it's playing with fire.

The concept is this: an art director sets forth a style guide. They shouldn't be expected to do all of the art themselves, but there does need to be a cohesive vision, boundaries and rules around what art looks like in the game.

The same is true of design, although typically design (especially game design) doesn't do that. Or if it does, it's to the level of auteurship and can cause problems. Inside of that is why I was a bad lead, and was able to grow into a good lead.

It was the solution to the challenge: if you have a lot of people who are obviously very talented, very intelligent, very driven, and they do enjoy the genre if they played it, but never worked on it, being able to present them with a really solid design gameplay style guide is the first step towards success.

Once there is a playable definition of good and they can actually feel it, it becomes much easier to have even those tricky design conversations around “why can't we do this with a tank?” or “why can't a tank just one-shot someone?”

Well, because that's a boundary that tanks aren't supposed to have or else there is no friction in our game. There is no asymmetry to create decision making. It's just a board full of queens! That's a boring game of chess.

Oh boy. Oh man. Let me think...

I was looking through a lot of the character kits and just remembering how much I love each of them.

That was actually what kicked off the thought of “oh shit, I designed like, all of these”, I designed and implemented… I remember even sometimes aggressively telling people “no, your feedback is not being implemented, this character is exactly what it's supposed to be”.

But then I see some of them that were designed by other people and they're some of my favourites.

I think “Krugas” was designed by a gentleman whose design moniker was ‘Wrongthinker’.

Krugas was an excellent character. There's some other characters in there where the opposite is true. Erebus is one that even in the fan Wiki is listed as “unavailable, being reworked”. That one didn't work out quite so well!

I was reminiscing about when TOME actually ended and what it meant to me from both a leadership and game development standpoint.

The game ended. And of course, to your point earlier about it being my first baby and having all these pleasant experiences with it, really feeling like an absolute utter failure was… there's no other way to describe it.

I think my three months of severance when I left the company after TOME was done, was mostly spent in an absolute alcoholic whirlwind. It was not healthy, to say the least. Don't always do the things I do, they're not always good.

I remember a moment where… I remember drunk texting a former executive leader for TOME and like, apologizing. I was like, “I can't, I'm so sorry. I can't believe that this game failed. I don't know”, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And I remember, to their credit, and also to my surprise, messaging me back and saying something to the effect of “Joe, you did absolutely everything we asked you to do; debatably we would not have continued spending money on this game if you had done not an excellent job.”

TOME's ending purely came down to a numbers game. The cost-per-install was not there. Essentially it was a product and marketing failure. And that did not make me feel any better.

But it's certainly an important inflection point in anyone's life, any game designer's life, when you start realizing the operating theory that our game was under the entire time — and while it did not come from me, I will take as much credit for it because I certainly championed it as much as anyone else — was “just make a good game and the money will come”.

That works for a Blizzard. It works for a Riot, it works for a Rockstar, it works for a company that already has a massive fan base and an eight figures marketing budget which is essentially just cost-of-doing-business at the end of the day.

It doesn't work for those of us who have yet to reach those heights and make that kind of impact and imprint on any player base yet. That was definitely something I was reminiscing about.

I suppose that this concept of… how did a game that, I mean, shit, it was five months ago when someone said, “please bring this back” on Steam as I saw today. I'm like, “how, why are you still talking about this game? It's dead!" I wish it weren't, but it is.

The sheer number of WoW killers I watched die… and then to be working on something that was trying to kill League was absolutely the starting point for saying “we shouldn't be trying to kill League”.

You're not going to kill League. You should be trying to exist alongside League.

Oddly enough! — that is something that Valve said to us after the decision was made to not focus on web first, but actually go to Steam as the primary business directive, which happened very late in development.

(There was a whole lot of that during the development, a lot of changing management. It's a fun place to work.)

There was this disbelief, from me, at least, that Valve had interest in TOME, but they were very supportive of it. After they played, they said “we will match your first million installs”. Basically you pay for an install, we'll pay for an install — first million. That's a huge deal!

For me, I was confused as to why Valve would do that. They owned Dota 2, they want it on the same platform, but they wanna promote it alongside Dota 2?

The person in charge of handling those discussions actually told me “they don't see it as a competitor” and my heart sank a bit. But they continued: “…they actually see it as a beautiful companion to Dota 2, they think it's a great onboarding point for people who are unfamiliar with the genre — they can play TOME, and if they wanna go to Dota 2, great.”

They also saw it as a steam valve, no pun intended, for Dota 2, where if the game is becoming too much for you: “step out, have some fun in TOME for a while, come back when you're ready.”

They had this mindset of recognizing “this isn't a competitor, it's a companion and that's perfect”. That's more or less what I was trying to make.

I think one of the reasons a lot of these games failed is they were trying to be WoW killers. They were trying to be League killers. And you can't, for the aforementioned reason that you are fighting against people who have at least as much experience as you do, but they're also making billions of dollars a year that they are reinvesting into their game.

You will not catch up. So I can understand why to most people, that says “differentiate, differentiate, differentiate”. “Take your shot, be as different as possible and try to get lucky.” But I don't think that's necessarily a successful strategy, personally.

Get to meta progression systems sooner rather than later. That period was very much an inflection point in our industry when it comes to 'games-as-a-service' as opposed to 'games-as-a-game'.

Any successful free-to-play game which expects players to regularly engage with it these days really does need systems that reward continued engagement.

I have been working on a presentation for designers to explain how you're essentially in a relationship with your customer, whether that be a friendly relationship or familiar relationship or a lifetime partnership or just casual dating or whatever.

If your goal is to have someone around for as long as possible, then you are attempting to start a long-term relationship with your players.

And what does that mean? What do you need to do to be kept around, by a person or persons for a period of time? Or vice versa — what do you need to do to be the best partner for someone over a long period of time? It really does shape the way people think about their designs.

That's the advice I would give to myself: “yes, this game is clearly very fun, but it's all cake and no steak.” You need to throw some steak in there, you need some nutrition. Something that's gonna sustain people and keep them alive, even if it's not quite as immediately tasty.

I realize that's a lot of metaphor and not direct advice. So I think I would say something along the lines of: “work on your long-term progression and even short-term monetization features”, because trying to sell champ access and skins was outdated even then.

That might have actually made a difference.

Sadly no. I haven't played a lane-pushing game in at least two or three years. These days I find myself more invested in the genres I'm actively working on.

As I'm sure you are aware, when you know how the sausage is made, sometimes you want to go eat some other type of food. These days I'm very much a roguelike player. That's my go-to, any chance I get.

I’m a little older than I was back when I was deeply invested in lane-pushing games. I may only have 15 minutes, so I want something that I know is going to have a neat, interesting experience for me. I can't always commit to lane-pushing games or multiplayer games in general.

That being said, yeah, a lot of the design documents that I write and have written, and a lot of the references I tend to use to demonstrate more fundamental mechanical relationships oftentimes goes back to lane-pushing games because they're ubiquitous.

Everyone is familiar with them, and so it's a really good place to draw comparisons if chess doesn't fit.

Shoutout to everyone I've ever worked with! I do love you all dearly… except one person (fight amongst yourselves). Then, friends, family, every stranger I've ever met.

Shout out to humanity, I suppose. Shoutout to Sean, yourself, for reaching out and suggesting this. It's one of the more novel things I've had the opportunity to do in a very long time. I was tickled pink. It was excellent. Thank you for that.

As far as what's next for me… I am quietly biding my time, I suppose. I've recently started a role in a genre that I have always loved but never had the time to invest in. That is a flowerbed of new design thinking for me.

I'm building something. I wanna say in my own little head, my own little time. I'm 36 now. Got a couple somethings, I got some time before I have to strike… but I don't know which it is yet.

You'll find out, whenever it is!