Technical Art, UI/UX Design, Pixel Art, Game Design, Production.

Adventure of Samsara

Adventure of Samsara is a metroidvania developed by Ilex Games and published by Atari, launched on 4th September of 2025. It is available on PC (via Steam and GOG) and consoles (PS4, PS5, XBOX One, XBOX Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 1 and Nintendo Switch 2). It has 94% positive reviews on Steam, 84 metascore and 9.5 userscore on metacritic.

I joined the project in 2022 when there was already a prototype in place and it was named Tower of Samsara, long before Atari got into it. Since then my involvement only grew to a point that I can say I gave 100% of myself and touched almost every aspect, object or scene of the project.

As the main Technical Artist and UI/UX designer, among my contributions are the designing and implementation of the user interface, the implementation of enemies, interactables, props, cutscenes and bosses, the setup of scenes and levels, the implementation of the level design pipeline alongside the tilesets pixel art and direct contribution to game design decisions. Everything I did was under Art and Technical direction guidelines, most of the time bridging the needs of the two while finding common ground with solutions. More details of the process can be found below.

UI Reel

UI Design

As a metroidvania the UX flow was quite simple, also, the game was fixed on a 16:9 ratio so screen resolution would not interfere on player vision on the levels, that made the UI design process more focused on aesthetics and implementation rather than complex flows or multi-resolution responsiveness.

I've designed the buttons, panels, HUD, menus and choose typography in constant back and forth with art direction to reach an aesthetic consistent with the 'sword and planet' game theme and fantasy sci-fi style. All the Icons and illustrations were made by the Art Director.

I've organized the prefab hierarchy and implemented the whole interface using Unity Canvas and C# with the guidance of our Tech Lead. I've also animated the interactions and states using Unity animation tools.

Lighting, Colorization and Optimization

One of the first contributions of mine to the project was handling a problem we had in which in order for the Art Director to control the coloring and lighting of the project, huge transparent PNGs were used on top of the levels, which got a heavy project really fast. Also, the saturation of the assets were really high to meet the intended aesthetic, making it hard to change the mood in between levels.

I suggested a de-saturation of the assets so we could have more control inside unity, the huge PNGs were then substituted for a combination of Unity 2D lights and Post-processing, making the project way lighter and performant. The only big PNGs still being used were the fogs, in which I suggested using a scrolling texture shader instead of animators.

Long after that, when we were QA testing the game for the consoles, we had some FPS drops on switch. After some profiling I could find the issues on some levels that were overusing fogs and on some UI components and proceeded to fix them.

Level design pipeline

When I started working in the project one of the issues was that building and iterating levels was a slow and error prone process, the art direction required that the levels were art based as opposed to tiled to avoid being repetitive, so every level was done in Photoshop and then assembled in Unity and every collider was positioned by hand.

At this point Atari had already entered the project and we could not afford to lose visual quality, which was something that got their attention and was a selling point. The solution we've found was using the software Tiled which could handle complex logic to build levels using custom rules of tiling and an auto-mapping feature.

After a month of R&D, polishing the rules and tileset, coming back and forth to meet art direction standards, I was able to build a system that was fast to iterate level design and reached a visual quality as good as the previous pipeline without looking too repetitive. Also, I drew all the tilesets with the amazing guidance of the Art Director.

As of now a Level Designer can iterate the levels using 3 simple colored blocks and generate a working level with a click of a button. Changing to different tilesets, or skins as we call it, is as easy and fast. I've continued supporting levels designers and made some changes along the way to contemplate their needs. I've also iterated and made some Level Designs myself.

Enemies, Bosses and interactables

I was responsible to implement all the assets done by our pixel artist in Aseprite into Unity, setting up the prefabs and inserting them on the scenes. In our pipeline we used a version of MetaSprite Ase importer that was improved by our Tech Lead, so I was responsible to configure the Aseprite files, import them into the engine and setup the Animator state machine. I've also configured and iterated enemies behavior using our behavior tree.

I've completely implemented two bosses according to the first game design draft, iterated their behavior and tweaked their numbers.

I was also responsible to implement the game cutscenes from the lead artist's Aseprite files into the engine using Unity's timeline.

Game Design

All of our game design decisions were made in a horizontal manner where everyone was encouraged to express their opinions and suggest solutions, in that regard there are plenty of designs that are direct contributions of mine in a way that is hard to point out. Those range from level design, enemies and boss design, interactables design, character controls, skills, spells and so on.

Some of them that I brought to the table and I could point out are the bow weapon's secondary attack, which is a backstep dropping an explosive mine, the hammer's secondary attack, which is a scythe thrown in a parabola, aerial attacks for both of these weapons, the blackroot that must be burnt to unlock paths and the explosive rune spell.

Production, QA and Bugfixing

I was in close contact with Atari in the meetings and used Jira on a daily basis, hearing feedbacks, helping creating and prioritizing tasks according to our schedule. I was also frequently testing the game, identifying bugs and fixing them.

Conclusion

Adventure of Samsara was a project that I loved every second being a part of, I've worked so hard and learned so much about the art and business of making games. I'll definitely carry this game in my heart for as long as I breathe.

A shout out to my companions at Ilex Games and the folks at Atari. Thanks ya'll!

Technical Art, UI/UX Design, Game Design, Production.

Zona Eleitoral

Zona Eleitoral is a casual strategy game co-developed by Ilex Games and Fisch Sibs. It is available on google play store and apple store and is still in development, a steam version will be launched by the end of 2026.

As the Lead Technical UI/UX Designer I was responsible for designing and implementing the user flow and user interface, animating it, guiding the main Artist, balancing the needs and expectations of the Design, Accessibility and Engineering teams while closely contributing to Game Design decisions.

UI Reel

UI/UX Design

When I got into the project the game was in an early prototype stage and the need for a UI/UX designer that could work inside Unity emerged. The image below shows how character selection looked like at that point.

They already had a really good illustrator so part of my job was putting his skills to good use. One of the first things I did was re-designing match setup and character selection, using as a reference elements associated with the election theme like the urn and the 'santinhos', which are small flyers that politicians use to market themselves and pollute the city.

Then I would sketch my ideas for the 2D artist and send him specifications for the files export so I could integrate and animate inside unity.

Here is how it all came out.

The game consists of acquiring votes on the different zones in the city, or in other words, asserting dominance in the map through actions.

The first draft of the actions menu can be seen in the image below.

At that point the game was kinda confusing for the players, they should decide if they where doing an action or a research, which topic that action would be about and in which zone they would act upon. I've suggested that we should change that menu with a hand of cards, that should make it instinctive for the player on how to proceed, and since we had a good illustrator, the increased workload on art would not only be easily handled but also well harnessed.

The topic mechanic was still rough on the edges, the player was supposed to chose on while acting and that would turn his action more or less effective depending on zone complex data. I suggested that his actions would automatically be improved if he had one or more topics in his sleeve that matched up to 3 topics favored in the zone. Now the player had less friction on acting and the information was easier to be presented to them.

At the same time game design was increasing the cognitive load on the player with new character and action data, it was getting harder to onboard the player at the same time that accessibility was requiring the information to be bigger for players with impaired vision. That started to become a struggle for the user experience and interface design, so I took some time to propose a synthesis on the mechanics, merging some character, actions and zones attributes. Fortunately the team was happy with my proposal and we implemented them, reducing cognitive load, making on-boarding easier and the interface clearer.

The research was moved to another screen, organized on different trees for better progression and understanding.

Events that pop up on the timeline were implemented, changing the outcomes of actions, giving player choices or just presenting election data in a more pleasant manner. That increased replayability since each match would have a different set of events.

Conclusion

Zona Eleitoral is a really special project for me, It was the first time I had to handle that much UI information so tied to gameplay. It was challenging, rewarding and enriching. I definitely want to work on other UI heavy projects like this mobile strategy game.

A shout out to my companions at Ilex Games and Fisch Sibs!

Technical Art, UI/UX Design, Pixel Art Animation.

Lux Ex – Cyber Initiation

Lux Ex – Cyber Initiation is an unreleased shoot'em up developed by Ilex Games as a sequel to Lux Ex – Legacy, for PC. It's theme is deeply esoteric and full of symbolism, where occultism and cyber meets.

In this project I was mainly responsible for designing and implementing the user flow and interface, however I've also worked on 3D backgrounds and animating pixel art bullets.

UI Reel

UI Design

The theme of the game was highly esoteric and the Creative Director had deep knowledge in Occultism, so the game is accurate and heavy on occult symbolism. For the main menu and the level selection, we used as a reference both the Mysterium Cosmographicum by Johannes Kepler and the Tree of Life from Kabbalah.

The Mysterium Cosmographicum models the solar system (and the cosmos) by inscribing platonic solids inside one another and calculating orbits by spheres generated on each solid's point of contact.

With that reference we built the main menu as representation of the Macro cosmos.

The Kabbalah is a occult knowledge from mystical Judaism and is used on a variety of magickal traditions. Tree of Life It is a representation on both the external and internal universes, laying out different 'worlds', to keep it simple.

In the level selection the Tree of Life is a representation of the work of the mage navigating in the cosmos, where each level is a 'world', and the player unlocks it's way to higher levels of consciousness by beating them and completing the tree.

As the themed involved the player character navigating on different realms of consciousness using a digital device, we went with the neon cyber 3D route for the menus, contrasting with the 2D Pixel Art gameplay, as if they were in separate dimensions.

In game screens followed that aesthetic, such as "Level Clear" and "Game Over" Screens.

The 3D models made for the previous screens were re-utilized in the Levels backgrounds' composition. A convenient solution that opened up the possibility to use the platonic solids associated with the elements of each 'world'. The scrolling inscriptions are animated via shader and only the Creative Director will remember what they mean.

Under the guidance of our Art Director I've painted and animated the sprites of enemies projectiles using Aseprite. It's dark interior and light border ensures that they can be distinguished on all backgrounds' color variations.

For this sequel I've adapted the previous game logo, bringing a new font and minor adjustments.

Conclusion

This one was a really fun project to work on, the occult theme is one that deeply interests me, the autonomy to be experimental and push the limits of what I could do at that time. I learned a lot about Unity in that implementation and about patience with blender, which is definitely not a strong point of mine.

A shout out to the companions I shared this project with at Ilex Games!

Technical Art, UI/UX Design.

PoN! A Ilha dos Tatus

PoN! A ilha dos tatus! Is a mobile multiplayer action game and educational initiative by Danskkultur Institut – Instituto Cultural da Dinamarca, financed by EUNIC – European National Institutes for Culture. The game is targeted to teenagers, aiming to address the subject of climate change and activism, based on the theory of the sociologist Bruno Lateur, entitled Politics of Nature.

As UI/UX Designer I was responsible for designing the user flow and user interface, setting up unity prefabs and animating them, implementing what I could without C# and then properly handing it to a programmer. I've also contributed with diverse asset integration and scene setups.

UI Reel

UI/UX Design

Working closely with the Creative director of the project, we've decided to use Cordel Literature as a visual reference since it's a part of the cultural heritage of Brazil, specially because the environments of the game were inspired by the Brazilian biomes.

Cordel Literature uses xylogravure to print it's booklets, which defines a distinct aesthetic I took as inspiration for the interface elements such as buttons, panels, icons, HUD and font choice.

Since the target audience was under aged, I made a collection of stickers so players could communicate in game without the safety risks for text based communication. They ended up being useful for marketing and other graphical materials.

In PoN!, the player engages in cooperative matches for up to 6 players, they can play offline solo, create or join online matches and choose in between different maps.

The user flow planned for the main menu:

Some main menu screens:

In the current version of the game, the armadillo's color is randomized in between players, in the original design it was planned to be personalized by the players in the following screen.

Conclusion

PoN! was the first project I've worked on at Ilex Games and that's one of the reasons it is in a special place in my memory. Back in 2022, here was the first C# line I attempted in an unity project, the first struggles with unity canvas, prefab hierarchy, animator controllers and so on.

I appreciate all the guidance and knowledge that came from the more experienced folks I've worked with in this game. Thanks, a shout out to you all!