Eva María Pérez Fernández

Lingokids

Game designer for two and a half years. Responsible for the game design, since the concept phase until the end of development, of 14 educational game templates. The games are published inside the Lingokids app and include puzzles, story-driven games, arcade games, logic games and creativity games, for ages 2-8. For every game I've worked on, my responsability is to design systems and mechanics, levels, and UIs, and work in a small team with an artist and a programmer to develop the game from beginning to end.

I am in charge of creating concepts from scratch, pitching ideas and sketches, and then creating high level concept documents and GDDs along with prototypes using Unity. Along with taking care of documentation, during development my role is to supervise the design and make sure the game's phylosophy is properly understood and put to work, assisting all departments when needed, along with balancing and tweaking the different systems to be appropiate for our players, until the games are published in the app. After publishing, I take part in data analysis and in designing polishing actions using said data. Throughout development, I also take part in presential user tests: preparation, attendance, and posterior analysis, extracting insights and polishing actions.

Here are some examples of games that I've worked on at Lingokids:

Bouncing Billy is an arcade game in which the player moves a spaceship in a map full of obstacles looking for letters that form a word. Level design was the key part of this development: spaces needed to be wide and being able to do backtracking easily was a must.

Photo Album is a game about exploring the surroundings of an open map to find animals and take pictures of them. Some animals are hidden, and some others appear flying, leaving only some seconds to tap on them and take their picture. The player also has a photo album in which the animal's photos can be revisited.

Wagon Catch is an arcade game conceived to approach counting to kids. Objects fall from the sky: the player's objective is to collect a certain amount of items. Powerups, boosters and punishing powerups fall too, modifying the game's behaviour when they are caught.

Tiny Tales is one of the first narrative-driven games created at Lingokids. The player's objective is to put together a story by ordering some cards sequentially. After getting them right, a narrator tells the story to the player.

Pattern Dance is a game used to teach patterns and sequences in a kid-friendly, understandable way. A character dances to a song in which some elements are repeated in a pattern, and the player needs to replicate the dance.

Artist Playground is a creativity game, an open play tool in which several brushes, backgrounds and stamps are provided to the player. This game had no concrete objectives rather than letting the players experiment and create: just providing the tools to let the players set their own goals for their drawings.

Spatial Puzzle is a puzzle game in which Tangram pieces are used to construct a figure that becomes alive after the player finishes building it properly.

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Necrognomicon

I was the Lead game designer for my master's degree project. Necrognomicon is a third-person action-tower defense game about smashing hordes of evil garden gnomes. In this project I designed every system in the game, including AI, horde manager, combat, weapons, narrative or levels, along with creating documentation and supporting all departments. Also conducted several playtesting sesions and did data analysis of the game's statistics after each session. Available on our team's itch.io page!

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Gatecrasher

Game designer. Gatecrasher is a tower defense created for an university project. Use St. Peter's troops to defend heaven against the attack of several sinners! I took responsability for game design, documentation, and working hand in hand with the rest artists and programmers. Available here.

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Balaclava

Game designer. Balaclava is an asymmetrical multiplayer game about robbing banks created for an university project. One of the players has to break into the bank and the other one will have access to a database with crucial information for the robbery to be successful. Together they'll have to solve puzzles, avoid guards, open safes and steal the cash! I developed the idea from scratch, creating the documentation and assisting throughout the whole development. Available here

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IFO

Game & audio designer. IFO is an arcade game I designed for a game jam. Theme was "ridiculous superpowers", so we made a game about fighting alien dogs by throwing them deadly slippers and putting a super-powerful sleepwalker baby to sleep. Check it out!

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Itch.io page

I've participated in several gamejams (some of them with more people, some other on my own) using different game engines (mostly Unity and Unreal Engine). All the projects are available on my itch.io page. Check them out here!

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Tequila Works

Unannounced AAA third-person adventure game

Role: Systems and combat designer

Duration: 2 years

Platforms: PC/Consoles

Team size: 130

Technology: Unreal Engine 5

The project has not been announced, so there is not much specific information or any media that I can add since the game is under NDA protection.

My contributions to the project:

Concept phase:

• Helped land the initial concept and prototypes of the game in a team formed by 10 people.
• Took part in designing core systems that formed the game's core loop and experience.
• Designed character mechanics and abilities, prototiped them and fine-tuned them.
• Designed and implemented a significant amount of puzzles that made use of the game's core systems.
• Designed, implemented and fine-tuned several NPCs' AI behaviors and abilities.

Preproduction phase and production phase:

Systems designer

• Worked as a systems designer for more than one year.
• I helped establish many of the main systems of the game. Some systems were related to the game's core rules (physics, destruction, sound...) and some others were related to AI agents (ecosystem, AI navigation rules, AI behaviors...).
• All the systems were designed to be easily explained and understood by the player, by making them as reliable and accurate to what players would expect as possible. All the interactions feature feedback (visual and sound) and reactions from the environment or from AI agents to make sure that the player understood the impact of their actions.
• Heavily focused on physics and destruction systems, making sure that they offered a realistic and believable experience.
• Designed and implemented puzzle prototypes that made use of the designed systems. Iterated on those puzzles until they reached a good enough state to be placed in the final game.
• Designed and prototyped AI agents. Designed and documented their abilities and then iterated on their behavior trees to fine-tune them (a list of some behaviors examples: follow, flee, attack, and other several special abilities related to each NPC).

Combat designer

• Worked as a combat designer in the same project for eight months, since more effort was needed in that department at that state of the project.
• Designed core combat systems that were used to define the core experience (entering and exiting combat system, player death...).
• Refactored the whole project's damage system, in order to make it systemic and more usable for the combat team and for all the project's departments.
• Designed and prototyped systems related to damage and objects destruction inside of combat state.
• Designed and prototyped player combat abilities (mainly, abilities used for enhancing combat mobility).
• Designed and implemented combat encounters that made use of the game's combat abilities and enemies. Tweaked and fine-tuned said encounters to offer the most polished experience possible.
• Designed and implemented systems used to enhance the combat's overall game feel.

Other contributions, outside of combat and systems: created and configured the project's player respawn system, and a significant part of the player's save file system.

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