It’s Time for Talent – With Pelinsu Ayas
Hi, my name is Pelinsu, it’s nice to e-meet you! 👋
I joined Tactile in February 2025 as a Level Designer, and I can’t believe it’s already been nine months, it’s flown by! I design levels for Lily’s Garden, creating experiences that bring joy to our beloved players.
💡As level designers, we collaborate closely with data scientists, QA engineers, gameboard artists, developers and producers. Our role is to bridge creative vision and player experience, translating data-driven insights into engaging gameplay. Beyond designing levels, we also design new gameboard mechanics, haptics, difficulty curves, and A/B tests to ensure a smooth and engaging journey for our players.
🚀 Before Tactile
Ever since I was a kid, I dreamed of creating products that people would enjoy and spend quality time with. That passion led me to study Industrial Design. This was long before I even knew that “level design” was a possible career path!
During my studies, I discovered a love for designing digital products, especially through research and A/B testing. That curiosity for digital experiences, where a single design decision could impact millions of people completely hooked me.
With this knowledge, I joined the gaming industry. I started working as a level designer at Peak Games where I worked on a game called Toy Blast. Later on I joined Space Ape Games where I designed levels for a game called Chrome Valley Customs. Both games taught me a lot in terms of the gaming industry and level design. Despite both being casual Match-3 games, level design approaches and mechanics were quite different.
Working on both an established title and a brand-new game gave me the rare chance to see the full spectrum of product development and apply my product design background in meaningful ways.
After some time in the industry, I started looking for opportunities that would allow me to work more closely with a wider variety of stakeholders. I’d known about Tactile Games for a while, and when this opportunity came up, I knew it was the right next step for me.
💜 Joining Tactile
When I joined Tactile, I had a very smooth transition from London, where I was based at the time, to Copenhagen. Everyone was very helpful, kind and welcoming! I also already knew some of my future colleagues from my previous workplaces, which was a really nice plus.
Before Tactile, I worked in smaller teams and within more traditional work models. At Tactile, our team spans different countries and time zones, and adapting to this diverse, flexible setup has been a really rewarding experience.
We’re an agile and dynamic team. Whether it’s a quick 10-minute sync to solve an issue or adjusting our plans to tackle something urgent, we move fast and collaborate deeply. That adaptability is essential in today’s gaming industry, and I love being part of such a responsive and forward-thinking environment. Our team also got bigger, so now we have more capacity to experiment and innovate.
💪 Having an impact
My team is responsible for everything relating to our in-game gameboard. This means that we are designing new levels, blockers and gameplay mechanics, adjusting level difficulties, as well as designing and maintaining a variety of A/B tests all with the aim of improving our player experiences.
The most rewarding part for me is seeing how our work directly impacts players. There’s nothing quite like looking at the data after a release or an A/B test and seeing positive results, or spotting enthusiastic player feedback about a level or mechanic we designed. That’s the kind of motivation that makes me want to keep pushing boundaries.
Within my team, we have a strong culture of collaboration, which comes to everyone quite naturally and intuitively. In my opinion, this is very important and something that is not easy to find. It’s rare to have such high levels of shared creativity.
🗝️ The keys to success
If you are a designer aspiring to join the gaming industry, my only recommendation would be that you follow the latest trends in the industry and identify where your unique skills can make a difference. The industry is incredibly dynamic, which makes it exciting, but also challenging.
When you play games, try to think like a designer. Observe what works well, what could be improved, and what you personally enjoy. Imagine how you would design that level or mechanic differently. This mindset will naturally sharpen your design intuition and creativity.
As a final thought, collaboration, as well as giving and receiving feedback are keys to being successful as a level designer and team player. Having these soft skills are as important as having the technical skills.
Every level, every blocker, every A/B test can be improved, and being open to discussing improvements makes the process both more efficient and far more enjoyable. When ideas flow freely, creativity thrives and that’s where strong collaboration really happens.
Time for Talent – With Mads Brandt
Hi, my name is Mads, it’s nice to meet you! 👋
I joined Tactile in May 2025 as a Frontend Engineer on the Core team.
The Core team plays a big supporting role across Tactile. We build and maintain the internal tools that keep everything running smoothly – from dashboards for the Data and Marketing teams to build systems and LiveOps tools. Our work connects so many parts of the company, and I love that what we build behind the scenes has such a wide impact across Tactile.
I also work closely with the other frontend engineers and product designers on cross-team projects like our internal design system, where we focus on creating a cohesive and consistent user experience across all our internal tools.
🚀 Before Tactile
It wasn’t exactly a straight line to becoming a developer for me. I’ve always been good with computers, but I actually started out studying marketing – which luckily turned out not to be for me, so I dropped out. After a few years of working in a supermarket, I decided to follow my curiosity for tech and applied for Computer Science.
That’s where I really found my passion for software development. Most of our classes were in Java, but I was always more drawn towards JavaScript and React, crafting frontends that not just functioned, but felt great to use. During an assignment on one of the first semesters we had to build frontends using static Java Server Pages (JSP). I couldn’t help experimenting a bit, so I figured out how to inject jQuery into them to make the pages dynamic.
While studying, I joined an InsurTech consulting company as a student developer and later continued there full-time as a backend Java consultant with a little bit of frontend. Over the next three years, I transitioned from the backend to solely frontend development, eventually becoming the Frontend Lead.
By early 2025, I was ready for something different – something bigger, more creative, and with more focus on how we build things and doing it the right way. I wanted to work with more frontend engineers to learn from and spar with, and a culture where taking the time to do things properly isn’t seen as a luxury but as part of the job. That’s when I found Tactile.
💜 Joining Tactile
When I joined Tactile, it was quite a change. I went from a company of around 40 people to one with more than 350 – over 200 in Copenhagen alone, and representing more than 50 nationalities. It’s almost rare to be a Dane here, and even rarer to be born and raised in Copenhagen like me. I love that, though – it gives the office such an international, inspiring energy with talents from all over the world.
Tactile doesn’t just hire for skills – we hire for culture fit, and we really mean it. We even have a culture book. From day one, everyone – not just my own team, but people on my floor and even across the whole building – has been incredibly welcoming. It really rubs off on you and creates an atmosphere where you actually want to collaborate, ask questions, and help each other improve.
The learning curve has been (and still is!) a bit steep when diving into data science related topics like dimensions, measures, aggregators, granularities, and data marts – but it’s incredibly rewarding to see how our frontend tools can help make that complexity more approachable.
💪 Having an impact
Within Core, we have different sub-teams. I am on the Data and Marketing team focusing on tools for these two teams.
My main gig is a major redesign of our Data Dashboard – the tool which our analysts use to reveal insights into player behavior across our games, and make data driven decisions. The original dashboard was developed years ago, mainly by backend engineers, and most frontend work since then has focused on the LiveOps Dashboard – so the Data Dashboard was definitely ready for some love
Before I joined, our product designers had created a completely new design that makes the process easier to follow and aligns with the LiveOps dashboard — and my job has been to bring that design to life.
Even though I work closely with the other frontend engineers on shared systems, code reviews etc. the Data Dashboard has become my project in a way. I really enjoy that sense of ownership, especially when I see how it can help others. Tactile is an extremely data-driven company, so it’s rewarding to know that the tools I build play a part in the insights that shape our games. But honestly? The best part is working with people who care as much about doing things well as getting them done.
📚 The keys to success
Hmm, stay curious and keep building things, even small projects. The best way to learn is by experimenting, breaking stuff (yes, we all make bugs!), and figuring out why it broke.
Don’t get too hung up on using the “perfect” tech stack or chasing every new trend. No codebase is perfect. There’s always legacy code, trade-offs, and things you’d love to refactor. At Tactile, we focus on improving things gradually; upgrading, cleaning up, and maintaining while still moving forward. You simply cannot be on the cutting edge all the time, especially in frontend, where sometimes it seems that what’s “in” last week might be deprecated today. What matters is writing solid, maintainable, clean code and keeping a steady pace of improvement.
Lastly, don’t underestimate the importance of communication. Writing good code is one thing, but explaining your ideas clearly, arguing for your choices, and collaborating with others is just as valuable – at Tactile, this matters just as much as your technical skills. The people who grow fastest are often those who ask questions and aren’t afraid to admit when they don’t know something. Find a place where that’s celebrated – it makes all the difference.
It’s Time for Talent – with Anna Diekelmann
Hi, my name is Anna, it’s nice to e-meet you! 👋
I joined Tactile in the spring of 2023 as a People Partner. My role here has two major focuses: I support our team leads, acting as a coach and partner on all people-related matters, and then I also spend a great deal of time designing new initiatives and processes that shape how we onboard, develop, and support our people.
🚀 Before Tactile
I’ve always wavered between pursuing a career in marketing or HR – both wanting to work creatively while also being driven by a wish to make workplaces a more meaningful place (after all, we do spend ⅓ of our lives here).
When I joined Tactile, I was brand new to the gaming industry. Coming from a similar role in an e-commerce company in the knitting industry 🧶I had a LOT to learn about games (to be honest, I still do).
But whether it’s within knitting or games, I’ve found that I really thrive in creative companies with a lot of freedom and little hierarchy – where things never stay the same for long, and where we have room to be playful and a little nerdy with what we do.
And in that sense, I think I found the perfect sweet spot between marketing and HR 🤝
💜 Joining Tactile
I joined Tactile right after the big growth phase following the success of Lily’s Garden. At that point, a lot of people had joined, and our team had the big task of helping Tactile transition from being very start-up-like into a more established company. That meant putting more structure in place around onboarding, development talks and leadership development. At the same time, it was really important to us not to lose the special ingredients in our culture: the flat and organic structure and the freedom to take ownership.
A lot has happened in the last 2 years. It’s been great to follow how our team leads have grown as leaders, see how projects like Tactile Bootcamp have helped build a bridge between the old and the new culture, and how we continue to learn and evolve as an organisation.
💪 Having an impact
I’m really grateful for the amount of trust and freedom our team has to decide how we work. There is a lot of room for new initiatives, and there is often a short timeline from when we come up with a new idea to when we start executing, which just makes work more fun and dynamic.
With agile and lean being at the core of our culture, it also allows us to never get stuck in old ways. We always ask ourselves, “Does this actually provide value?”, so we don’t end up adding processes just for the sake of processes. When we do develop new processes, we have a “no size fits all” approach, meaning we tailor everything to the individual teams. It forces us to stay flexible and constantly iterate and optimize how we do things, and I find that so rewarding.
Looking back, I’m really proud of all the things we have built that have made an actual impact for our teams – I feel that is kind of rare in an HR position.
📚 The keys to success
With fear of it sounding too buzzword-y, I want to say adopt a growth mindset. This industry is moving fast and things change all the time, which is fun and refreshing but it can also feel overwhelming at times. Be ready to adapt and lean into the chaos. And don’t be afraid to ask a lot of questions – it’s the best way to learn.