Ventures
Strengths
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Leadership & Initiative
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Strategic Planning
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Game Design & Development
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Team Management & DevOps
Domains
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Spatial Computing & XR HMDs
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Immersive Education
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Online, Social & F2P Gaming
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Generative AI & LLMs
Native
Fluent
Hi! Welcome!
My name's Rafael. I'm a passionate founder, life-long learner, creative problem-solver, designer & developer interested in the frontiers of science and technology.
Looking to exchange ideas? Get in touch!
Contributions
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Reviewed grant proposals from developers seeking to build on the IOTA and Shimmer blockchain technologies
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Created the Treasury's Discord server, an open space for community questions, discussion and transparency
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Created the Tangle Expert, an AI chatbot with expertise of IOTA and Shimmer, for the community to interact with
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Helping grad students prepare for the industry, pursue indie dev, secure funding, work with Publishers & more
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Reviewed SBIR grant proposals in the areas of Learning & Cognition Tech and Human-Computer Interaction
Education
M.S. in Interactive Entertainment
University of Central Florida
2017 – 2018
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Pioneered research in spatial computing for education which received over $1.3 million in awards
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Awarded Fulbright Scholarship ($25,000) & FIEA Director Fellowship ($22,186)
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Led a 16-person multidisciplinary team from whiteboard to market in a record-breaking capstone project
B.S. in Game Design - Summa Cum Laude
Polytechnic Institute of Bragança & Kajaani University of Applied Sciences
2011 – 2015
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Graduated as #1 top student; awarded the "golden diploma"
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Brokered a new Erasmus deal between universities, securing a year-long exchange in Finland
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Shipped and monetized 2 mobile games on the Apple & Google Play stores as a solo developer
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Shipped 8 casual and social games for desktop & mobile browsers during a 6-month internship at CoolGames
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First-gen student
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Pioneered spatial computing research in traditional education which received over $1.3 million in awards
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Developed novel solutions for the deployment of consumer 6DOF VR in traditional classrooms
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Partnered with research institutions (UCF, WestEd) to study the effects of VR in the classroom
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Repeatedly featured at the Kennedy Center, at the invitation of the US Department of Education
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Grew dev team to ~8 people at its peak, plus another ~15 global mods, regional mods & Game Masters
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Acquired expertise in games-as-a-service, MMORPG design, virtual economy design, game balance & more
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Sharpened my skills in game design, dev tooling, business operations, scaling multidisciplinary teams & more
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Designed & implemented back-end and front-end (e.g. explorer, product pages, reviews, bookmarks, schema mark-up, etc)
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Implemented generative AI chatbot with text generation, image generation and chat history using the OpenAI API