At Tactile, we encourage people to explore new ideas, develop new skills, and shape their own career paths. Sometimes that means growing deeper within your discipline, and sometimes it means discovering an entirely new one.
Rufo joined Tactile in 2021 as a Junior 3D Artist. Four years later, he’s helping shape the future of game art as a Technical Artist with a focus on AI, building tools, streamlining workflows, and empowering artists with new technologies.
We sat down with Rufo to talk about his journey, what sparked his interest in AI, and why he believes technology should help artists create even more, not less.
Tactile: Hi Rufo, Can you tell us a bit about what your role was when you first joined Tactile?
Rufo: I started out as a junior 3D artist here at Tactile back in 2021. The first project I ever worked on was Makeover Match, where I modelled and textured props for the different environments in the game. Not long after, I expanded into creating assets and shaders for various in-game cinematics and marketing videos.
Tactile: How has your journey at Tactile evolved since then?
Rufo: I’ve always been curious about technology, so I’ve made it a habit to stay on top of the cutting edge and the possibilities it brings to our medium. That curiosity, paired with a tendency to need to shift my focus to something else quite regularly (arguably to a fault!😂), has given me a pretty big opportunity to evolve.
Tactile is a goldmine of knowledge if you make an effort to learn from your coworkers. I’ve gained so much valuable experience from so many people at the office, and I hope people have learned at least a bit from me as well.
Tactile: What inspired you to transition from 3D Artist to Technical Artist with a focus on AI?
Rufo: While curiosity and ambition played a big role, I would say it mostly happened organically. 3D art comes with its fair share of technical challenges, and being exposed to these led me down the rabbit hole that landed me where I am today. For starters, 3D is a great medium to learn to think outside the box since so much of it boils down to problem-solving. That foundation gave me the confidence to dive into deeper technical territories—like exploring generative AI for art production and developing custom tools for pipeline automation.
Tactile: What does your role look like today?
Rufo: Codex and Claude have been real game-changers for my work, and I’ve already seen a few artists here at Tactile develop their own tools despite “vibe-coding” sounding intimidating at first. My job is also quite collaborative. Communication with others is essential, in fact. I rely on them for valuable feedback or even development assistance.
There’s an immeasurable amount of technical hurdles for artists and there’ll probably always be something to improve or solve.
Tactile: How do you collaborate with artists, engineers, and other teams to bring AI into your workflows?
Rufo: It usually starts with isolating a specific problem or idea, followed by a cycle of prototyping and refinement until it’s ready to share. Once the team gets their hands on it, the feedback loop begins, allowing me to tailor the solution to their exact production challenges. At the end of the day, my job is to facilitate production and make artists’ lives easier—not to enforce new workflows just for the sake of using new technology.
Tactile: Looking ahead, what excites you the most about the future of AI in game development?
Rufo: Now that the initial “AI-hype” smoke has somewhat settled, and we’ve arrived at a point where AI has become controllable enough for artists to truly leverage them. That usually means cutting down hours of tedious tasks, turning days of processing into minutes, and iterating on concepts rapidly while fully retaining our artistic vision.
At the moment I’m very excited about the democratisation of software development and its possibilities. Just as someone who has had no previous experience in art creation will put out a worse product than a seasoned artist, even with AI in their toolset, the same applies to software development. The barrier to entry has dropped so significantly that anyone can now build things that were previously unimaginable.
AI is here to stay. That’s a matter of fact. So then, our focus should be to empower artists rather than to lessen their creative input. They are, after all, one of the most important backbones of a well-crafted video game.
Thank you for the interesting chat, Rufo 💜
It’s Time for Talent – with Selin Azak
Hi, my name is Selin , it’s nice to virtually meet you! 👋
I joined Tactile in January 2026 as a Product & Publishing Manager. In my role, I work closely with external studios and internal teams, acting as a bridge from early ideation to live operations. A key part of my role is building Tactile’s publishing arm from the ground up, defining how we work with partners and setting up the overall structure. Alongside this, I support teams in building, validating, and scaling puzzle games with strong market potential.
🚀 Before Tactile
Before joining Tactile, I spent over 6 years in the mobile games industry, mainly focusing on casual, hybrid-casual, and puzzle games.
Most recently, I worked as a Publishing Manager, collaborating with multiple studios on ideation, prototyping, and scaling games. Before that, I was a Product Manager, where I gained hands-on experience across product strategy and game development processes.
Throughout my career, I’ve worked on more than 20 games, with a strong focus on early-stage validation, CPI-driven testing, and achieving product-market fit.
💜 Joining Tactile
Since joining Tactile, it has been both exciting and challenging in the best ways. There is a strong opportunity to shape how we collaborate with external studios and build new products from the ground up, while also setting the right processes and aligning multiple stakeholders.
What stands out most is the collaborative culture and the level of trust, which creates a great environment to take ownership and drive impact.
💪 Having an impact
Our team focuses on discovering and developing new game opportunities, especially in the puzzle space. We work closely with studios to identify strong concepts, validate them through testing, and evolve them into scalable products.
The most rewarding part of my work is seeing an idea evolve from a simple concept into something players genuinely enjoy. At Tactile, I have the opportunity to influence both product and publishing decisions end-to-end, which makes the work both challenging and highly motivating.
📚 The keys to success
For anyone looking to enter the industry, my main advice would be to approach games with a product mindset. Don’t just play them, analyze them. Try to understand why decisions are made and how they impact player experience and performance.
At the same time, connecting with people in the industry and learning from different perspectives can significantly accelerate your growth.
Most importantly, test your ideas. In today’s market, data is key, and meaningful insights come from continuous experimentation and iteration.
An extra thought…
The mobile games industry moves fast and is highly competitive, but that is also what makes it exciting. If you enjoy solving problems, working creatively, and seeing direct impact from your decisions, it is an incredibly rewarding space to be in.
Time for Growth – with Laura Hummel
At Tactile, we encourage our team members to take ownership of their own development and drive their upskilling to match the needs of the company, as well as their own aspirations.
The desire to upskill oneself is crucial for the success of our business, so having team members with that mindset is what we believe is part of pushing us forward.
We chatted to our Player Insights Lead, Laura Hummel, to learn more about how growth journey from user support, through user research and into player insights.
Tactile: Hi Laura, can you tell us a little bit about what your role was when you started at Tactile?
Laura: I started at Tactile in the summer of 2019 as a Player Care Manager for the User Support team, which at that time was just Celesta and me; a small but mighty duo! 😀
Tactile: How have you grown and developed in your journey at Tactile since then?
Laura: Starting in Player Care, I began dipping my toes into User Research by interviewing players and speaking with them directly, while still focusing on my support role. Over time, that gradually turned into a full-time User Research position.
A few years later, User Research and User Support were brought together under the larger umbrella of Player Insights. That was when I stepped into the role of Player Insights Lead, helping guide both the User Support and User Research teams and giving the company a broader, more connected view of player insights across Tactile.
Tactile: How did the transition into a User Research role officially happen?
Laura: During my time as a Player Care Manager, Tactile quickly recognized the need to strengthen the connection between our players and the game developers. Since the Player Care team had already built relationships with many of our most active players, the transition felt very natural.
It started with me reaching out to players and having video chats with them about their experiences in our games. Those interviews turned out to be incredibly valuable, and from there, the ‘player insights’ part of the role kept growing until it grew into a full User Research team.
I was very lucky to work with some wonderful mentors here at Tactile, who helped train and guide me into the wide world of User Research, while also giving me the opportunity to learn on the job through courses and tools.
Tactile: How have you been developing as a Player Insights specialist since then? What does your daily routine look like?
Laura: Going from Player Care to User Research to Player Insights Lead has definitely been a bit of a roundabout journey; it feels like a full-circle moment. Player Insights is actually the perfect combination of the skill sets I’ve built along the way.
My role is a bit unusual in that I essentially work for the other teams at Tactile, and that’s something I really love. No two days are ever quite the same. One day, I might be testing a new game concept with players, and the next I might be designing a study to better understand our current player base for a particular game.
What I enjoy most is getting to be a bit of a detective: helping teams find answers that are not always obvious from game data alone, and bringing the player perspective into the bigger picture.
Tactile: What do your development plans look like going forward?
Laura: For User Research, development really means staying up to date with new and improved methodologies, tools, and ways of working. Games User Research is still a relatively young field within research, so it feels especially important to stay connected with peers and keep up with how the field is evolving. AI is also at the forefront of almost every conversation right now, so a big area of focus is exploring and testing which tools can genuinely support our work in meaningful ways.
On the Player Insights side, one of my personal goals is to become more independent and confident with the ‘slightly scary’ in-game data side of things! 😅 A lot of my User Research naturally focuses on qualitative data, so I’d really like to continue building my knowledge of how to combine in-game data with research findings to make our studies even stronger. At the moment, I still happily lean on our Data Analysts/Scientists when needed, but the goal is definitely to grow more confident in my own abilities there.
Thank you for the lovely chat, Laura 💜