Andrea Saffirio

Senior Technical Game Designer

With 5+ years of experience as a Technical Game Designer and an academic background in Game Design and Production Management, I worked on several projects mainly in the AAA industry. I have professional experience in:

Designing, prototyping, iterating and owning features and systems.
Coordinating cross-department development team to deliver results with the highest quality.
Developing and working with game systems, data management and AI agents – both in Unreal Engine and Unity.
Using Blueprints, ABPs, Behaviour Trees, Data Tables, Data Assets and other tools.
Coding with C++, Python, VBA and others, both to create custom tools and to manage large datasets.
Teaching and mentoring.

Contact me for the latest version of my CV and to talk about job opportunities.

Contact me Linkedin

Featured Professional Work

SteelHunters

Senior Technical Game Designer

SteelHunters was the first multiplayer project I had the opportunity to work on, and I had the task of owning the PvE part of the whole game. When I joined DPS Games in 2024, the studio was in a peculiar situation: some systems supporting the PvE were already done after preproduction, but many required a heavy refactor to be supported.

Here I had the unique chance of being the owner of the PvE part of the game. That meant designing new behaviours, systems, abilities, weapons, and other features for the NPC entities. Plus: it came with a complete refactor and integration of the Unreal Engine 5 systems.

There is a lot to unpack about the work I did on SteelHunters, click below to read more.

Star Wars Outlaws

Level Designer/Technical Game Designer

Working at Massive Entertainment was, as the name implies, a massive commitment. As is tradition, at least for me, at Ubisoft, I was thrown in the project and given no onboarding or guidance of any kind and while I needed to support a “cell” of several developers of colleagues of Milan with technical work.

My contributions here were many: on one hand, I worked on regular game/level design on the Quests we as a group were tasked with; on the other, I created random events, interactive elements and AI logic, which were outside of the initially-limited scope of supporting this cell with the Quest logic graph.

Mario+Rabbids: Sparks of Hope

Technical Game Designer

My breakthrough in the AAA industry. I started working in Milan as a Junior Technical Designer on a Nintendo Switch project, with no onboarding nor mentoring. Because of this, I learnt how to work autonomously as soon as possible, while bearing growing responsibilities throughout the project.

I had the opportunity of working on several areas of the game, among which character creation and implementation, UI and UX integration, abilities, weapons and more.

Check the link below for more detailed info.

Secret Oops! (Apple Arcade)

Game Designer, Level Designer and Tester

Working in Mixed Bag (now Memorable Games) was not my first experience in the game industry, but it was the first one that lasted almost one year. Although I yearned to steer my career on a more technical direction, my contribution on Secret Oops! was not limited to the design of levels and mechanics.

I had the chance to work on prototypes of unreleased projects in Unreal Engine and to implement features and level assets in Unity, which were the key activities that made me consider applying for technical roles later on.

The Ambition of an Artist

The Ambition of an Artist was part of the coursework of a University module which required to create a five-minute-long video of a game prototype. My work consisted of creating a narrative experience featuring puzzle solving and environmental interaction. Throughout the game, the player can access to worlds inside paintings and, by exploring them, finding clues and collecting information.

Extrema Ratio

The concept of Extrema Ratio was developed as my Honours Project. The purpose of the project was to create an alternative method for controlling multiple protagonist characters. The development lasted four months circa.