I was one of these kids that grew up playing and modding video games (or making them unplayable 🤡). My first contact with actual development was through my father’s Web Design books that taught me how to write HTML and edit photos on Photoshop; something I did throughout my teenage years.
After High School, I moved to the city of São Paulo to attend a Design college where I earned a degree and a specialization in Game Design.👨🎓
I officially started my career in the videogames industry in 2011 as a QA Tester for Glu Mobile, who at the time, was developing its new gladiator game “Blood & Glory”.
In 2012, Glu closed its doors and I became unemployed in a country that barely had game studios.😢 So for a time, I worked as a freelance Graphic Designer for a few companies, something I didn’t love. Then in 2013, I started studying C# Programming to make my own games on Unity. That decision put my career back on track.
I became a programmer and enlisted my artist friend Arthur Ciappina to make games with me. Our first game (Retro Runners) was ridiculous 😳, but got featured on Google Play and made me enough money to keep pursuing the Game Developer career. Then I developed other games with different mechanics to learn more about programming and it became a very sustainable business, achieving more downloads each time we published a new game.
The apex was “Westy West“, a cowboy game that surpassed a million downloads, got mentioned on important websites and even became a finalist at Google Play Indie Game Festival LATAM 2018 🥉.
After that, Arthur and I parted ways and I decided to pursue a long time career goal; making a game alone. I developed “Square Fists“, an ambitious boxing game 🥊 filled with mini-games of varied mechanics.
It took me 2 years to finish the game and I finally published it in 2021. It was another successful game, scoring an average 4.9 on user reviews, and it’s the project I’m most proud of.
After that, I published the game “Cows & Crops” 🐮, which is a match-and-merge game that I made for myself. As of December 2022 I’m developing a Rhythm game.
The Brazilian game industry grew a bit during these many years, but it’s still very small. Now that I have a portfolio, I feel it’s time to search for opportunities overseas.
Besides that professional stuff… I have many hobbies, I love the outdoors and I invest most of my free time in hiking trips as you can see on my YouTube channel Canal do Mato.
My games
As a Programmer, Game Designer and Artist:
- Cows & Crops (2022)
- Square Fists (2019/2020/2021)
As a Programmer and Game Designer:
- Westy West (2016/2017)
- Retro Runners X2 (2015)
- Mad Santa (2014/2015)
- Randomizer Pro (2014)
- Tiny Acrobats (2014)
- Retro Runners (2013)
As a QA Tester:
Marcelo Barce 