Helga Karamelnaya

Game Design Team Lead @ Gear Games

About

Senior Game Designer with 13+ years experience. Managing teams, building complex systemic features and balancing innovation with long-term live service goals.

Country

City

Russia

Industry

Computer Games

Skill

Spreadsheets, Figma, Miro, Confluence, Notion, Jira, YouTrack, Trello, OperSearch, SQL, Unity, Git, Level Design, Backlog, roadmap planning, LiveOps, Economy Balance, Game Design, User Stories, Scrum, Monetization, Game Balance, Game Economy, UI/UX wireframes, Hiring, onboarding, Group Leadership

Experience

Game Design Team Lead

Gear Games

2021-9 - Present · 5 yrs 1 mo

Moscow, Moscow City, Russia

Grew two game designers into team leads for Monetization and LiveOps. Led two year-long features: redesigned main screen UX and introduced a flexible competition meta. Carefully balanced innovation with player habit to avoid churn, unlocking architectural room for future systems. Maintained community trust during rollout. Art of War 3: Global Conflict — https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.geargames.aow&hl=ru

Product Owner & Producer

Bureau Games

2020-12 - 2021-8 · 9 mos

St Petersburg City, Russia

Create a team. Created a team from scratch. Made 2 games in redesign - auto chess. Projects: Gold Machine / Divinity Tree

Lead Game Designer

Nord Beaver

2020-12 - 2021-8 · 9 mos

St Petersburg City, Russia

Led design for multiple experimental and commercial projects. Worked closely with clients on vision alignment. Projects: BurningMan Festival Online / AliExpress: LetAli, AliTree (Alibaba group) / Alone in the Bank / Boohooman

Senior Game Designer

Kosmos

2019-4 - 2020-12 · 1 yr 9 mos

St Petersburg City, Russia

Owned economy, monetization and analytical loops. Focused on retention, pacing systems and LiveOps. Project: Solitaire Online https://kosmos.games/portfolio/kosynka-online/

Лид Гейм Дизайнер

Game Mavericks

2017-6 - 2019-1 · 1 yr 8 mos

Built game design and art teams from scratch, set up company-wide pipelines and launched 4 radically different projects. Projects: Off-road Truck Simulator / San Francisco City Race / Robot Wars / World Off-road Rally

Game Designer

TABA Studio

2011-4 - 2013-6 · 2 yrs 3 mos

Game Desginer

Overmobile

2010-11 - 2012-1 · 1 yr 3 mos

Novosibirsk, Russia

Solved a two-year-old design bottleneck in an MMO by reworking core combat math. Preserving early game integrity while extending system scalability for 7+ years of new content. Solved in one week after two years of deadlock. Calculated real-world Lagrange points for geostationary satellite orbit as part of a space sim design. Applied a specific case of the three-body problem. Driven by personal passion for astrophysics and quantum mechanics.