Hello and welcome! I’m Javi Ansoleaga, a versatile Game Designer with 10 years of experience.
I’m a passionate, self-learner individual valuing commitment and teamwork.
Through my experience raising my own indie studio and growing a team of six dedicated professionals, I developed good leadership and communication capacities. I learned to overcome all kinds of obstacles with a proactive approach to
problem-solving, and acquired a valuable skill-set as a Game Designer.
Today, I am looking for a new challenge to apply my creative, technical and management competencies. I’m eager to join a great team and add value to build a thrilling project while progressing in my career.
PROFESSIONAL PROJECTS
Abyssals is a Survival City Builder in the dark depths of an inhospitable planet. Build your underwater colony, explore where light can’t reach, and hunt for scarce resources. Expand your infrastructure and power your lamps, as danger lies in the deep, hidden in the dark.
- Studio: OverPowered Team
- Platform: Pc
- Genre: Survival City Builder
- Engine: Unity Engine
- Time: 2022-2024
- Led the design vision from the ground up, improving workflows, creating documentation, and balancing systems in-engine.
- Facilitated cross-department collaboration to ensure a unified approach to the game’s development.
- Conducted regular meetings with the publisher, showcasing playable demos, explaining new mechanics, and securing buy-in for the evolving design direction.
Explore a galaxy full of wonders in this sci-fi grand strategy game. Interact with diverse alien races, discover strange new worlds with unexpected events and expand the reach of your empire. Each new adventure holds almost limitless possibilities.
- Studio: Paradox Interactive
- Platform: Pc
- Genre: 4X / Grand Strategy
- Engine: Clausewitz Engine (in-house)
- Time: 2021-2022
- Contributed to Stellaris' Live team focusing on updating, polishing, and balancing old content, as well as designing QoL improvements and new mechanics.
- Collaborated with the Game Director on an unannounced project, playing a key role in refining the game concept and early systems.
- Spearheaded the initial stages of design proposals, prototypes, and brainstorming sessions. As well as full feature documents, flowgraphs, and UI/UX mockups.
Satisfactory is a first-person open-world factory building game with a dash of exploration and combat. Play alone or with friends, explore an alien planet, create multi-story factories, and enter conveyor belt heaven!
- Studio: Coffee Stain Studios
- Platform: Pc
- Genre: FPS / Factory Building
- Engine: Unreal Engine
- Time: 2019-2021
- In charge of the design of new features for Update 4, from concept to implementation.
- Created different prototypes using Blueprints to test new combat mechanics or propose new NPCs.
- Kept constant communication with other departments, staying open to suggestions and ensuring a common vision.
- Conducted several brainstorming sessions, analytically considering the game as a whole to decide on new updates.
- Helped balancing different recipes, creating complete excel sheets and accompanying graphs.
- Proactively proposed new mechanics and game systems to improve on overlooked issues.
- Studio: Saber Interactive
- Platform: Pc/Consoles
- Genre: Fighting
- Engine: Unreal Engine
- Time: 2019
- Designed, configured, and balanced new combat mechanics, and environment interactions.
- Created game modes adding and tweaking mechanics while preserving good accessibility.
- Studio: Saber Interactive
- Platform: Pc/Consoles
- Genre: FPS
- Engine: Unreal Engine
- Time: 2019
- Researched the market and references to create an interesting proposal following publisher’s guidelines.
- Responsible for creating early GDDs used to iterate with the publisher on the initial game idea.
- Studio: Saber Interactive
- Platform: Pc/Consoles
- Genre: Fighting
- Engine: Unreal Engine
- Time: 2019
- Designed, configured, and balanced new combat mechanics, and environment interactions.
- Created game modes adding and tweaking mechanics while preserving good accessibility.
- Studio: Saber Interactive
- Platform: Pc/Consoles
- Genre: FPS
- Engine: Unreal Engine
- Time: 2019
- Researched the market and references to create an interesting proposal following publisher’s guidelines.
- Responsible for creating early GDDs used to iterate with the publisher on the initial game idea.
- Studio: Evolve Games
- Platform: Pc/Consoles
- Genre: Twinstick Shooter / Horde
- Engine: Unity Engine
- Team: 6 People
- Time: 2016-2019
- In charge of all Design work, from early prototypes and mechanics to balance, in-engine implementation or UI/UX.
- Designed combat mechanics, skills, base building and economy systems, equipment, game flow and progression.
- Ensured heroes and enemies had a unique role & identity, designed AI behavior, waves and difficulty curve.
- Wrote extensive documentation, including a bible, excel sheets, system diagrams and tools/pipeline documents.
- As head of the studio, I was responsible for Team management, Creative direction, Production, PR, and Publisher meetings.
- I supervised all art production while helping with low-poly modeling, UVs. Researched and implemented shaders.
Guardforce combines the quick action of a top-down shooter with mechanics inspired in both the TD and RTS genres to offer a unique proposal in which the player will get to master different strategies to defend from enemy hordes in a Sci-fi setting. With great emphasis on player agency and a branching defense system, the game offers different paths for players to develop their own tactics, progressing to defeat the cyborg hordes using their hero skills, base defenses, mercenaries or all of them.
Some examples of Art done for Guardforce. I was responsible for Lowpoly modeling (retopology), Uv Layout and Integration in Unity.
- Studio: Evolve Games
- Platform: Mobile
- Genre: Lander Simulator
- Engine: Unity Engine
- Team: 3 People
- Time: 2014 – 2015
- In charge of all the Game Design, including the core gameplay loop, power-ups, ship control & physics, and game balance.
- Responsible for Economy & Monetization design.
- Designed and built over 40 levels, including the Tutorial design.
- Implemented special Shaders and built the whole UI in-engine.
- Created all Vfx and 2D Art for environments, props and main ship.
Rescue Lander is a modern spinoff of the traditional “Lunar Lander” by Atari. Try your skills driving one of the 10 customizable spaceships and rescue some astronauts lost on two unexplored planets. You will play different levels to reach your goal, but be careful, a forced landing, an accident or an excessive waste of fuel, will ruin the mission.
PERSONAL / PROTOTYPES
(2016) A RTS game in which you get to grow and control a neverending horde of evolving aliens against the humanity.
Article on Gamasutra: Learning from Failure: Post Mortem of an Unborn
ABOUT ME
I’m a creative and curious person, I’ve spent my whole life seeking new interactive experiences to analyze and immerse myself into. Be it Video games, MTG, Warhammer, D&D or Board games; I always find myself evangelizing games and introducing them to friends.
I started my career as a 3D Artist while I also got experience with C# scripting in Unity. Then my passion for video games development led me to start Evolve Games in 2014. Five years of entrepreneurship adventure brought me naturally to handle all sides of the development business: Game Design, Team and Product management, Artistic vision, Production, Industry awareness, and Publisher relationships.
This allowed me to gain an invaluable experience, to get out of my comfort zone and to grow both in personal and professional manners, being confident in overcoming the challenges ahead. I learned the importance of positive leadership, good communication and the value of keeping a team motivated to work together towards common milestones.
Being responsible for the full Design process in various projects and as part of the design team in other companies made me skilled in features documentation, balancing, prototyping, in-engine workflow, gameplay & systems design, level design, etc. And provided me with a great sense of balance between creative, technical and product visions.
I’m today a friendly, self-motivated, and committed professional. Always seeking new ways to improve at work, collaborate with teammates or learn new skills to add value to the project.
