Álvaro Barrientos
Game Designer | UX/UI Designer
5 years of experience as a Game Designer
4 titles released in both PC and Consoles and 1 yet to release
Unreleased Projects
Ironskins
TMNT: Mutants Unleashed
Ignited Steel
Evil Dead: The Game
Wildcard Football
aheartfulofgames - Game Designer
February 2023 - August 2025
Saber Interactive - Junior Technical UX/UI Designer
August 2021 - February 2023
About Me
I'm a Game Designer with 5 years of professional experience developing AA and indie games for PC and consoles. Throughout my career, I've contributed to multiple shipped titles, including TMNT: Mutants Unleashed, Evil Dead: The Game, Wildcard Football, and Ignited Steel, (and one yet to release: Ironskins) working across gameplay design, narrative design, UX/UI, balancing, level design, and technical implementation.I'm a hands-on designer who enjoys turning ideas into playable experiences. I like prototyping, implementing features directly in-engine, iterating through playtesting, and collaborating closely with programmers, artists, animators, and fellow designers to polish every aspect of the player experience. I also enjoy creating clear documentation and maintaining efficient design pipelines that help teams move quickly without losing quality.Over the years I've worked with both Unity and Unreal Engine, implementing gameplay, UI, dialogue, cinematics, tutorials, and game systems while always keeping player experience at the center of every decision. Whether I'm designing a new mechanic, balancing progression, or refining UX, my goal is to create intuitive, engaging, and memorable experiences.
I am currently looking for work. You can learn more about me in the home page and also check out my projects.
You can send me an email if you want to contact me or ask for my CV.
6 years of experience as a UX/UI Designer
4 titles released in both PC and Consoles and 1 yet to release
Ironskins
Evil Dead: The Game
Wildcard Football
Ignited Steel
EVERYGamer
Game Developer's Library
Saber Interactive - Junior Technical UX/UI Designer
August 2021 - February 2023
About Me
I'm a UX/UI Designer with 6 years of experience designing interfaces and user experiences for AA and indie games on PC and consoles. My work goes beyond creating screens, I focus on understanding player behavior, solving usability challenges, and implementing intuitive interfaces that support gameplay and improve the overall player experience.I have extensive hands-on experience implementing UI in Unreal Engine and Unity, collaborating closely with programmers, game designers, and artists to ensure designs work as intended in-game. From wireframes and user flows to implementation, iteration, usability testing, and polish, I enjoy being involved throughout the entire development process.My design philosophy is simple: every interface should feel invisible, every interaction meaningful, and every design decision should serve the player. I believe the best UX comes from constant iteration, clear communication, and close collaboration with multidisciplinary teams to transform complex systems into experiences that feel natural and rewarding.
I am currently looking for work. You can learn more about me in the home page and also check out my projects.
You can send me an email if you want to contact me or ask for my CV.
UNRELEASED PROJECTS
At aheartfulofgames I participated in the pre-production of two unreleased projects, which are currently cancelled due to the studio's closure.They were both similar action-focused videogames, one of them more cinematographic than the other.In both of them I was in the Combat Design team, where I did:
Design of various movesets for different playable characters
Implementation in Unity of said movesets
Enemy design
Implementation in Unity of said enemies
Designed a cinematographic combat system, alongside my two teammates
Implementation of said cinematrographic combat system in Unity, alongside one of my teammates
It currently is under NDA so I can't show any of it in public. Nevertheless, I do have some IP agnostic recreations of both combat prototypes that I can show on demand.
IRONSKINS
Ironskins is a turn-based tactics mech videogame with strong focus on narrative, where turns happen simultaneously.I was in charge of:
Creating and fixing ingame cutscenes and dialogues
Level Design: Implementing narrative and gameplay events based on different battle conditions
Game Balancing:
- Mech parts
- Characters
- Enemies and enemy parts
- Enemy encounters on levelsSystems Design: Designed new and redesigned existing systems in the game to make it more accesible and rewarding
CASE STUDIES
IRONSKINS
UX STUDY AND UI REDESIGN
Role: UX/UI Designer & Game Designer
Engine: Unity
Areas: UX Study · UI Design · Accessibility · Controller Support · Implementation
I was in charge of redesigning the entire game's UI with 3 main objectives in mind: make the game feel faster and more intuitive to play, make it compatible with gamepad controls and fit all the Game Design changes that happened between the old UI and this one
PROBLEMS
Controller support
- The old UI was only usable with mouse and keyboard, and we wanted the game to also be played with a gamepad
Information hierarchy
- There was too much information displayed at all times, making it hard for the player to tell the important from the less important
Accessibility
- The old UI was very unintuitive and was very hard to use. The player had to learn both the game and how to use the UI, so the game was not very friendly with new players.
UX STUDY
The previous experience was confusing, because there was too much information in the screen that was not relevant for the player. My first approach was to identify which information was necessary in each moment and start making mockups around that.It was a long iterative process because with a game so mechanically complex it was not easy to identify all the necessary information, and there were a lot of edge cases too.
Another one of the problems is that the game felt very clunky to control, it was a Game Feel issue that fell into the game's UX instead of the Game Design due to the turn-based nature of the game.The player had to move the mouse around the whole screen all the time to play, it did not feel good so I had to think a solution to make the game feel more responsive and intuitive.
REDESIGNS
The battle HUD was crowded with information almost all the time and was clunky to control, so in the redesign my goal was to show information sequentially and only when needed.
The mission selection screen required the player to find the mission they wanted to play via trial and error. The final solution ended up being adding a list of all avaliable missions with a bit of information about them so the player has an overview, but without losing the flavourfull metaphor it had before.
Accessibility AND Controller
One of the best solutions I ended finding was the Radial menu which fixed a lot of problems the old UI had: it made it much faster and intuitive to assign orders to your units, made it usable with a controller, and made some less important information only appear when it was needed.
IMPLEMENTATION WORK
I worked hand to hand with our UI programmer to make sure the UI implementation was as smooth as possible. It was key, because during the implementation we were able to see problems that were impossible to predict in the static designs, and we were able to fix them and make specific redesigns faster to fix them.
RESULTS
The game now is fully playable with a controller
Improved the information hierarchy and the interaction clarity
Players learn how to play the game faster
WHAT I LEARNED
UX is part of the game system
- Interface decisions need to reflect the underlying mechanics and player goalsImplementation changes design
- Testing the UI in-engine revealed problems that weren't visible in static designsSimplicity requires understanding complexity
- Reducing friction doesn't mean removing depth; it means making the underlying system easier to understand
EVIL DEAD: THE GAME
TECHNICAL UX/UI & USER TESTING
IRONSKINS
Ironskins is a complex turn-based tactics mech videogame, where turns happen simultaneously.
Responsible for the complete game's UI overhaul. Made a redesign for all of the ingame screens from start to finish.
Wireframing and low fidelity mockups on Figma
Ellaboration of high fidelity mockups on Figma
Ellaboration of final UI elements using Adobe Photoshop
Collaborated in the implementation of the new UI on Unity
TMNT: Mutants Unleashed
Worked in TMNT: Mutants Unleashed as a Narrative Game Designer.
Designed and implemented in Unity more than 30 ingame cutscenes and dialogues.
Some examples of conversations i was in charge of
Wildcard Football
Was part of the Wildcard Football development team, as a Junior Technical UX/UI Designer.
User Research, mainly via focus testing made alongside the Game Design team
UI implementation on UE4 using C++ and UE4's UMG
Wireframing and lo-fi mockups on AdobeXd
Ellaboration of hi-fi mockups on Adobe Photoshop
Wildcard Football
I was part of the Wildcard Football development team, as a Junior Technical UX/UI Designer.As part of the UX/UI Team some of my tasks in the development were:
User Research, mainly via focus tests performed alongside with the Game Design team.
UI implementation on UE4 using C++
Wireframing and low fidelity mockups on Adobe Xd
Ellaboration of high fidelity mockups on Adobe Photoshop
Ellaboration of final textures for UI elements on Adobe Photoshop
Evil Dead: The Game
I was part of the Evil Dead: The Game development team, as a Junior Technical UX/UI Designer.
User Research, mainly via focus testing made alongside the Game Design team
UI implementation on UE4 using C++ and UE4's UMG
Wireframing and lo-fi mockups on AdobeXd
Ellaboration of hi-fi mockups on Adobe Photoshop
Evil Dead: The Game
I was part of the Evil Dead: The Game development team, as a Junior Technical UX/UI Designer.As part of the UX/UI Team some of my tasks in the development were:
User Research, mainly via focus tests performed alongside with the Game Design team.
UI implementation on UE4 using C++
Wireframing and low fidelity mockups on Adobe Xd
Ellaboration of high fidelity mockups on Adobe Photoshop
Ellaboration of final textures for UI elements on Adobe Photoshop
Ignited Steel
I worked as a Game Designer on Ignited Steel, a Turn Based Tactical RPG with Roguelite elements.
Systems design, participated in the conceptualization and development of the mech overheat mechanic
Combat design, designed mech modules, enemies and character abilities
Participated in the design and writing of in-game tutorials
Ignited Steel
I worked as a UX/UI Designer on Ignited Steel, a Turn Based Tactical RPG with Roguelite elements.My main tasks here were:
Responsible for the entire game's UI design from start to finish
UX Research
Wireframing and low fidelity mockups on AdobeXd
High fidelity mockups on AdobeXd
Ellaboration of final UI elements on Adobe Photoshop
Game Developer's Library
Game Developer’s Library is the final project for the UI Design module of my UX/UI Design masters degree. It is a fictional web magazine focused on articles about Game Development and Game Design, in a similar way to gamasutra but also focused on Board Games and Tabletop RPGs.What I did:
A Moodboard and a Lo-Fi wireframe to lay the foundations of this project
An atomic Design System, choosing the colors, typography and ellaborating small blocks that would later compose the final design
A Hi-Fi wireframe with the design system I had previously ellaborated. This included a home page and two example pages (all responsive) and also a Landing Page only designed for desktop
Implementing the Landing Page using Wordpress, HTML and CSS
EVERYGamer
EVERYGamer is the final project for the UX Design module of my UX/UI Design masters degree. It is a non-existing app with the purpose of making it easier for disabled people to find accessible videogames.What I did:
Product Definition using a Scope Canvas, Lean UX Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas. I also made a Benchmarking and a MoSCoW Diagram.
UX Investigation by making an Empathy Map and a Lean Survey Canvas, which helped me ellaborate both a User Persona and a User Journey
Interaction Design by ellaborating a Site Map and some Medium Fidelity Wireframes for the MVP of the app