Damián Rizzotto | Game Developer & Designer

About Me

Currently a Lead Engineer @ Tic Toc Games

I am a seasoned game developer based in Los Angeles, specializing in game design, development, and production. With over years of industry experience, I have contributed to the successful delivery of multiple games across various platforms, including the Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Steam, Web, and PlayStation Stores.

As a self-motivated professional with a creative mindset, I am always eager to take on new and challenging projects. Have any ideas that could use some expert assistance? Let's connect and bring them to life!

Testimonials

"Damian is a rockstar engineer, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with on a match 3 title in live ops. During a publisher acquisition of one of our titles, Damian expertly navigated a challenging tech transition as well as grew into the responsibilities of a lead engineer. His intuition for game design augments his already-strong abilities as an engineer, allowing him to more effectively fill in the gaps & ambiguities in a design and make the game stronger as a whole. Smart, diligent, and hard-working, Damian is an invaluable member of our team and a pleasure to work with."

Tucker Elliot

Senior Product Manager - Marvel SNAP

"Damián is a very responsible and proactive developer, always looking to improve his skillset. He has a vast knowledge in Unity and its best practices. One of his greatest talents is the ability to quickly detect flaws in UI/UX designs. So far his work has included architecting client side MVC, implementing UI designs and developing gameplay code."

Jorge Lorenzon

CEO - Sandstorm Interactive

My Greatest Strengths

Game architecture and development

UI/UX analysis and implementation

Game design

Console porting and tailoring

Unity Tools development

Optimization

Project management

Teaching

Getting Personal

Video games have been a huge part of my life pretty much since I was old enough to hold a controller. They are the reason why I started my career, my job and my hobby.

I'm a developer, but I'm also a gamer. So when it's time to play I try to see everything from both sides. Over the years I've played a huge variety of games, from Grim Fandango's amazing adventure to Portal's fascinating puzzles, from Hollow Knight's constant challenges to StarCraft2's journey of self-improvement, and if I have learned something so far is that the possibilies to learn and improve are endless.

I have passion, professionalism, hunger to grow and I always give my best to every game I'm a part of.

Sincerely,

Work Experience

Mar 2023 - Present

Lead Engineer - Match Upon A Time

Tic Toc Games

Lead Engineer for "Match Upon a Time", a casual match-3 game that introduces a unique gameplay mechanic called "Time Freeze" along with an engaging decoration metagame.

Led team of engineers from prototype phase to soft-launch and greenlight process.
Provided bi-weekly engineering updates to publisher.
Documented project for stakeholders approval.
Participated in roadmap and sprint planning process.
Designed gameplay and meta-systems architecture.
Implemented new match-3 gameplay engine.
Added SDKs alongside flow for iOS ATT, GDPR, analytics and performance tracking.

Jan 2021 - Mar 2023

Lead Engineer - Funko Pop! Blitz

Tic Toc Games

Took part in sprint planning and initial task estimations.
Redefined new systems design process to account for long-term maintainability and tooling.
Collaborated with designers on early system design feasibility and provided player-oriented improvements.
Overhauled live-ops process to be more reliable, easy to maintain and keep a changelog of interactions to detect possible issues early-on.
Documented game architecture and created resources to improve engineering onboarding and product management understanding of available levers.
Performed previous role engineering tasks.

Jun 2019 - Jan 2021

Senior Game Engineer - Funko Pop! Blitz

Tic Toc Games

Senior Engineer for Funko Pop! Blitz, a casual match-3 game featuring characters from multiple IPs such as Doctor Who, Shrek, Back to the Future, General Mills, Hello Kitty and many more.

Designed, implemented, refactored and optimized core gameplay and meta systems.
Adapted architecture from offline to online-only structure based on Playfab's backend Cloudscript code.
Collaborated with designers, artists and testers in order to have a unified project vision, find process pain points and possible improvement opportunities.
Initiated module audits to detect technical debt and better project documentation.
Helped design, put into action and validate project-management-related frameworks (Analytics, AB Testing, IAMs, Deeplinks, etc)
Secured build stability via performance tracking, testing and prompt issue detection/fixing.
Implemented UI layouts and behaviour systems.

Nov 2014 - Jun 2019

Senior Game Developer

Sandstorm Interactive

Sandstorm Interactive is an indie company focused on offering high-quality outsourced development. Thanks to this I've worked for numerous clients with different needs, target platforms, project complexities and team sizes, as well as internal projects of the company.

The main projects I've been involved in belonged to:

Sandstorm Interactive

Developed games for multiple platforms using, mostly, Unity3D.
Implemented custom tools to improve UI iteration times, localization, data import/export and other ease of use improvements.
Created real-time multiplayer games based on Java and C++ servers made from scratch.
Developed turn-based asynchronous game systems based on Java (Play Framework).
Implemented turn-based strategic games artificial Intelligence.

Abstraction Games

Tailored games for PS4 and PSVita which included UI changes, gameplay tweaks and console platform integrations among others.
Debugged and optimized games for low end targets.
Performed console manufacturers technical requirement checklists validations.

Widow Games

Developed board games adaptations for mobile platforms in Unity3D.
Designed multiplayer backend services and servers.

2009 - 2013

Web Designer, Mobile Developer and Others

Freelance

As a Freelance Agent I was in charge of finding clients, getting to know their needs and establish a feedback loop to ensure the job was made to the right specifications on time.

Some of my work consisted of:

Web design and development
Graphic design (Logos, Banners, Icons, Layout Mockups, among others)
API planning and implementation
Basic Android applications development
Database creation and management
Tech and variety blogger
CMS creation and maintenance

Skills

Personal

I am a fast learner, I'm always looking to improve in my craft and I don't mind admitting my limitations in order to keep learning. I'm very detail-oriented but I know how to establish realistic deadlines and allocate my time. I am definely a team player, both as a developer and as a team leader, and I strive to create a good work environment where people can show off their potential.

Programming Languages

My greatest strength is definitely C# given all my Unity experience. Along with it, Javascript is a close second due to many backend services and frameworks using it, such as Playfab. I also know Java thanks to my back-end work using Play Framework and the JBox2D physics engine. I've used C++ for multiple custom-made multi-player gameservers with it. Lastly, I've extensively used HTML, CSS and PHP because of my web development background.

Engines and Frameworks

I've been using Unity almost exclusively since version 4.2 (Circa 2014). I know the ins and outs, best practices and most of those little intricacies you can only know after using a piece of software for a long time. For back-end services I've used mostly Playfab as most projects I've been part of required lightweight, stateless, web-friendly, highly-scalable architectures able to manage a large number of concurrent users. I've also worked on custom solutions based on Play Framework. For game servers most of my experience has been working with custom-made solutions which integrated either JBox2D or Bullet as physics engines.