Alexandre Chaves

Solving Game Design problems with Technical and Creative skills.

I’m a Technical Game Designer specializing in level design, gameplay systems, and player experience, working at the intersection of design, art, and engineering.

I design and build levels from concept to final implementation—starting with blockouts that align with core mechanics, and evolving them through iteration, balancing, and playtesting to achieve strong gameplay flow and pacing. My work focuses on ensuring that each space supports both player understanding and engagement, while also meeting technical and performance constraints.

I prototype and integrate gameplay directly in-engine, validating ideas early and refining them through iteration. I don’t aim to develop every system independently—instead, I collaborate closely with engineers to scale features for production, ensuring they are robust, performant, and aligned with the overall design vision.

Beyond implementation, I contribute to visual direction and composition, working with art teams to define themes, shape language, and environmental storytelling. I also support optimization efforts, ensuring levels maintain performance targets without compromising player experience.

I operate as both a designer and integrator, connecting disciplines and aligning decisions across teams. This includes mentoring teammates, coordinating with stakeholders, and contributing to broader design direction and team processes.

In practice, I:

Design and iterate on levels to achieve strong gameplay flow and pacing
Prototype and implement gameplay to validate mechanics and player experience
Collaborate with engineers to ensure systems are scalable and performant
Work with art teams to define visual direction and environmental composition
Optimize levels while maintaining gameplay and visual quality
Create in-engine cinematics to support storytelling and presentation
Mentor team members and contribute to design team alignment
Communicate with stakeholders to align design goals and production needs

Tomb Raider Remaster (2026)

Designed and implemented enemy placement and randomization systems for the first three TR titles, improving encounter variety, pacing, and replayability.

I worked on Challenge Mode, a free update for Tomb Raider I–III Remastered that allows players to replay levels with customizable difficulty modifiers.

My focus was leading enemy placement and encounter design across the entire mode, ensuring that combat remained engaging and balanced under a wide range of player-defined conditions. Because Challenge Mode allows players to scale enemy stats, quantities, and even swap enemy types, encounters had to be designed to remain coherent and fair across highly variable scenarios.

Each level was reviewed and reworked with attention to pacing, difficulty, and spatial context. Empty or underutilized areas were improved through deliberate encounter placement, while maintaining the identity and flow of the original levels. The goal was to make every configuration feel intentional rather than random.

I also contributed to structuring a data-driven approach for managing enemies and their configurations, enabling consistency and scalability across all levels. This supported the implementation of systems like enemy scaling and type swapping without breaking gameplay logic.

To support production, I documented all encounter changes in a centralized Level Design Document, providing QA and developers with a clear reference for validation and alignment. This ensured that even with the added complexity of modifiers, the experience remained testable and reliable.

The result was a system that supports high replayability while preserving balance and design integrity across the full trilogy.

UFO Robot Grendizer – The Feast of the Wolves (2024)

Technical Level Designer on the Nintendo Switch port of UFO Robot Grendizer: The Feast of the Wolves, focused on streaming optimization and visual consistency.

Bringing an open-world experience to the Nintendo Switch meant rethinking how the world was structured and delivered to the player. As a Technical Level Designer on UFO Robot Grendizer: The Feast of the Wolves, my work focused on making large environments feel seamless despite strict hardware constraints.

I defined streaming areas across six open levels using Unity, carefully controlling when and how sections of the world loaded. The goal was to eliminate visible pop-in and maintain the illusion of a continuous space, often by adjusting level composition and introducing geometry to mask transitions without affecting pacing.

Alongside implementation, I worked closely with programmers to guide improvements in streaming tools and workflows, and communicated solutions and design challenges to stakeholders through structured presentations. Performance validation was a key part of the process, organizing profiling data to track FPS, CPU, and GPU gains as optimizations were applied.

The result was a more stable and cohesive open-world experience, where technical constraints were handled in a way that remained largely invisible to the player.