A motion graphics I designed for a cultural contest called Energias do Mundo (http://www.energiasdomundo.com.br). This presentation relates famous artists and their art to different types of energy. I tried to keep the graphics simple to maintain focus on the arts. I like the result, even more because it was made in a very small period of time, and I was away from motion graphics for years.

The cavemen animation was created by the awesome artist Rafael Marquetto: www.rafaelmarquetto.com
Also, additional logo placement and corrections were made by Delfina: www.delfinah.com

The Game’s main interfaces

Level selection stage and the actual game in progress

Genre: Time-management.
Worked with: Game design and balancing, design and art of the interfaces, co-created the story and wrote the dialogues.
Released in: TBA 2010.

My Own Beauty Center is a DS title aimed for little girls and pre-teens where you play as Cindy, a girl who wants to work at a beauty parlor. However, she’s so clumsy she’s always destroying something. She has a hobby of collecting old furniture and items from secondhand shops, and one day she buys herself a piggybank. It turns out that this piggybank is in fact a wizard, who grants her a wish – to have her own beauty center!

The game’s proposition was to include several minigames from our previous DS titles into a new one, in a lower budget project. Therefore, we decided to focus our efforts on the game’s art, story, music and personal style, trying to create a more unique experience from these standard girly casual titles.

I was very happy with my work in My Own Beauty Center. I didn’t get to work on the game design as much as I wanted (it was mostly done, since we were using the other minigames for creating this one), but I loved the UI Art and the game’s script!

Click below if you want to see more pictures and read about these other aspects of the game:

The art has a distinct, retro-classy feel – which is something very connected to Cindy’s hobby – but it is far from boring or “old”. The palettes aren’t as shocking as most DS titles aimed for girls: These are usually very saturated and and the art elements abuse of the traditional “girly icons” (shining stars, hearts…). We decided to use a lighter color palette , and I designed some nice art nouveau pixel art for the UIs. With this we achieved a great look that stands out of the regular game we compete.

Winning and losing the level

Game Cursors

Hair minigame

Cutscenes

As I said before, I really dig this game’s story! The characters are funny and full of personality. The dialogues carry a cheesy humor and there are no major conflicts in the story – so the whole experience is very light and entertaining.

There are 6 chapters in the story, each with a “boss” at the end, a special character that appears with an urgent request (for example, there’s a desperate bride that’s late for her wedding, or a renowned artist who wants a new look to receive an award). In addition to these cutscenes, there’s also what we called “break scenes”, small dialogues that increase the player’s empathy with the characters.

This game is my favorite work, not because of the game mechanics – which detract a lot from the game -, but because we managed to direct the artistic aspects of the game just where we wanted!

Gabriel Duarte

27 years old – born in 27/04/1983

Currently living in Buenos Aires, Argentina

skype: gab.duarte
contact@gamma-beam.com
LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrieldrt

Work Experience

June/10 –
Game Designer
Gameloft (www.gameloft.com)
Working on projects for the apple devices.

March/08 – February/10
Game Designer, Interface Designer and Writer
Overplay (www.overplay.com.br)
Worked on several published games for Web (flash) PC (downloadable) and Nintendo DS.

March/07 – August/07
Web and Print Designer (intern)
Tonic (www.tonic.com.br)
Worked as an intern designing and developing flash websites and print projects.

2006 – 2007
Production Assistant (freelance)
Mao Direita (www.maodireita.com.br)
Worked as a production assistant for the company’s documentaries.

2004 – 2009
Web and Print Designer (freelance)
Escola do Sítio (www.escoladositio.com.br)
Designed several graphical projects for this elementary school, some hot-sites for special presentation and also the last 3 versions of their main  website.

Skills

• Fluency in English / Intermediate Spanish
• Graphic Design softwares: Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Indesign, After Effects, Encore – Advanced
• “Office” softwares: Microsoft Office or OpenOffice packages: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio – Advanced
• 3d softwares: 3dstudio Max, Blender and Z-Brush – Intermediate
• Audio softwares: Audition, Sony Vegas, Propellerheads Reason – Intermediate
• Game Development Software: Nitro Systems – Advanced / Playground – Intermediate / Construct – Advanced.
• Scripting languages: AS2 – Intermediate / AS3 – Basic / LUA – Basic
• Additional skills: Bugtracking / Subversion repositories / Wiki maintenance

Education

2003-2007
UNESP – Universidade Estadual Paulista (www.unesp.br)
Bachelor in Graphic Design. – 4,5 years

March 2010
SENAC – SP (sp.senac.com.br)
Project Management – Extension Course – 48 hours

2nd semester of 2007
Impacta Certificação e Treinamento (www.impacta.com.br)
Two courses on basic programming and Actionscript (AS2) – 20 hours each

Avalon's First Stage - Earth

Avalon Potion Making Minigame

Genre: Casual RTS (persistent world)
Worked with: UI Design and some of its art, tutorial system, game design of the minigames, the game’s script and quest creation.
Released in: June 2009

Avalon was a huge challenge. This game is massive, with lots of features and subtle mechanics to deal, even though the player doesn’t have to worry about what’s going on behind the screen – it’s a casual game after all! In Avalon you play as the fairy queen, and must order your sisters to gather resources for the colony, while also researching and transforming the scenario in order to progress through the story.

It was a very challenging experience, and I got to work on the most varied tasks. I specially enjoy the minigames, which are very different from each other, and their mechanics could easily be on a separate game (with some extra work, of course!). The game script is also something I’m proud of, because it was the first time I wrote a game script, and I liked the outcome – it is very entertaining and it supports the game’s epic, magical feeling.

On the other hand, I think the quests were too random for the player to care: If I could do it again, I’d make it much more straightforward.

Overall, the game is very satisfying and the idea of having a vertical, 2D setting for the flying fairies – along with a nice parallaxed enviroment – was definetlly the right choice for us.

You can check out more screenshots over here:

The Chanting Minigame

The Pollination Minigame

The Last Stage - Fire

One of Avalon's many decision events

Genre: Casual Strategy / Bussiness Simulator
Worked with: UIs for the game, art for the Main HUD, collaborations in the game design (minigames) and art direction.
Released in: April 2009

Winemaker Extraordinare is a Casual “tycoon-style” game, where you play as Maria Bellaventura, a stressed city girl who inherits a Winery from her grandfather. You must produce the wines (playing minigames for each step of production), and sell them in order to travel and look for the lost recipes of your grandfather.

In Winemaker I was responsible for creating the user interfaces of the whole game. It was a fully-featured project, with lots of buying/selling options, locations, quests and inventories. The game also features three minigames, each with a different game design. I did wireframes for the whole game before it entered production phase, which was very good because it kept things tight and cohesive. In the middle of the project there was a big change in the game design, so the UI was significantly changed.

This was my first big project in the gaming business, and the outcome was very favorable!

You can see more screenshots (and the wireframes for the screens) here:

I’m showing some of the wireframes for the UIs and the minigames:

Selecting Grapes Minigame

Combining Grapes Minigame

The Wine Supplier (where you buy your resources)

Genre: Educational Adventure.
Worked with: Designing and creating the art for the Oracle System (inventory, quest-tracking and infographics). Also designed some of the in-game puzzles.
Released in: Second semester of 2009.

Operation Cosmos is an educational adventure game that teaches physics, mathematics and astronomy to young kids, with a lot of humor and some clever puzzles. In Operation Cosmos I designed the Oracle Interface an art: Our hero, Eco Luz, uses a PDA that stores all information gathered from his journey, as well as his inventory and quest-tracking notes. Inside the Oracle the player can access the Eduks, which are animated infographics that summarize some key concepts needed for puzzle solving (i.e. Velocity, Gravity, Electricity, Volume Calculations, Measure Systems).

I enjoyed the results of this project, the interface is very tidy and easy to access, and the several animated infographics were very understandable.

You can watch more screenshots of the infographics here:

Amebóides was my first experience on creating board games. It is a simple tile-placing game about making amoebas and awarding points for that. The nice twist is that players play this game with their hands open, so you can create some strategies from what tiles they have. Amebóides was designed as a print & play game, so it is “black and white print” friendly and the page layout is easy to cut.

Overall this game is very fun to play, but it lacks more playtesting for balancing. I’ll probably release it on the new Gammabeam website anyway, maybe I can get more feedback from there.

This is the old Gammabeam website, and it went online on January 2008. You can access and see it in full motion here: Old Gammabeam  Website

Cannons and Robots is a very ambitious work of mine. It is a tactical wargame that was a game design study on games that doesn’t have the “luck factor”. The game mechanics is really hardcore: You have three customizable robots, where you spend points to buy attributes and abilities. The main objective is to go across the battle arena, grab the cannon ammunition, return to your base and shoot them towards the enemy’s base. It is a basic “capture the flag” type of game, but the robots abilities and the movement system make the game very interesting and with high replayability. I also like the art style, and seeing the printed version was very exciting!

However, the game suffers the same problem as “Amebóides”: The lack of playtesting. This games needs serious balancing, and it is probably not very playable as it is. I still intend to work on it, though.

Genre: Time-management
Worked with: Pre-production. Interface solutions, mock-ups and prototypes. Some collaboration in the art production.
Released in: September 2009

Nanny 911 is a casual time-management game based on the famous reality show. I worked in the pre-production of this game, designing interface solutions, wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes. I also played some part on the art production, coordinating the character animation method. My work on Nanny 911 was very brief and way before some critical changes on the project, but I still see some of my UI designs when I look at the screenshots.