News

Melissa, first, congratulations on your recent promotion to Lead Designer on City of Heroes. That is a huge accomplishment for you, and the entire City of Heroes community should be excited as well. What are your thoughts on your recent promotion and what will the job entail?

I'm excited about the new challenges as Lead Designer on City of Heroes. It's been a wild ride these last few months, full of big personal changes and growth, so this new opportunity promises to be quite an adventure for me. For those of you curious what that means from a work perspective, I will be transitioning out of the World arena (so much for my Queen of the World title) and into a more global position as Lead Designer.

In a nutshell, the Lead Designer guides the Design team and steers the overall direction of its focus and the initiatives for the game. The Design Department conceives and spearheads features and content and works with Art and Programming to implement these features, so there are a lot of creative and administrative challenges in this responsibility. The Lead Designer also evaluates risk vs. reward, cool vs. lame, and attempts to incorporate ongoing feedback from the players about what features they want and what we, as a studio, can do from a technical or scheduling standpoint.