Eva Pérez
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Tequila Works

Systems & Combat Designer — 2023–2025

Overview

  • Project: 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.

High-level responsibilities

  • Systemic game design with emergent systems.
  • Combat mechanics & systems. Special focus in game feel systems.
  • Prototyping and in-engine setup in Unreal Engine 5.
  • Cross-team alignment and ownership of specific features.
  • Create and maintain documentation.
  • Hands-on prototyping to validate risks early.

Tools

  • Unreal Engine 5
  • Miro
  • Confluence and Jira
  • Google Spreadsheets

Contributions — Concept phase

Helped land the initial concept and prototypes in a ~10 people strike team. Co-designed core systems forming the game’s loop and experience; designed, prototyped and fine-tuned character mechanics and abilities. Implemented a significant number of puzzles leveraging systemic rules; designed/tuned NPC AI behaviours and abilities.

Physics & destruction readability.
Physics & destruction readability.

Contributions — Systems Design

  • Worked 1+ years as a systems designer, establishing core rules (physics, destruction, sound) and NPC AI-related systems (ecosystem, nav rules, behaviours). Prioritized predictability and feedback clarity (VFX/SFX, environment/AI reactions).
  • Owned physics and destruction systems, designed them from scratch and created puzzles and gameplay beats based on them.
  • Created puzzle prototypes based on systemic interactions using mentioned systems along with others (sound systems, wind systems, light systems...).
  • Believable emergent systemic reactions & feedback to communicate the game's status to the player.
  • Created NPCs that provided different gameplay situations: from traversal enhancers to tools to be used in puzzles.
  • Designed and prototyped AI agents and iterated behaviour trees.
  • All of these materials can be shown under a NDA clausule.
Physics & destruction readability.
Physics & destruction readability.

Contributions — Combat Design

Combat readability & systems.
Combat systems & feel.
  • Worked as a combat designer for eight months to reinforce the department.
  • Designed core combat systems: entering/exiting combat state within an open world, or player death and respawn conditions, or a fall damage system, among others.
  • Refactored the project’s damage system to be systemic and broadly usable.
  • Designed/prototyped environment destruction & damage systems inside combat, making them systemic and usable as combat tools.
  • Designed/prototyped player combat abilities (mostly, mobility-focused, like dashes and air dashes).
  • Designed/implemented combat encounters in an open world. Level design and layout for the encounters.
  • Implemented systems to enhance overall combat game feel that rewarded players with a better feel if they were proficient in combat.
  • All of these materials can be shown under a NDA clausule.

Other contributions: created & configured the open world player respawn system, and a significant part of the player save-file system.