Gerasimos Filippakos

Hi there! I'm Jerry, a games programmer and designer currently based in Athens, Greece. With over 10 years of Unity Development experience, both in Game Design and Games Programming, I've become an expert in creating what I want instead of what the engine allows me to, always overcoming obstacles and enjoying the endless education that comes with it. 
 
My love for games came from my dad, who let me play my very first game, Deus Ex, when I was 3 years old. My favourite genre was, is and will always be MMORPG games, at the point of looking for and trying every single MMO there was, mostly free to play as I was young and had no budget. A close second is any type of competitive games, mostly those that require hundreds of hours of practice to get to a certain level of expertise, such as Apex Legends, Rocket League and Elden Ring. Being a gamer has taught me many great lessons and equipped me with an important skillset including critical thinking, hand-eye coordination, and analyzing an environment carefully to accurately assess each situation I face.

Through hypercasual game development for 5ive Games, I prototyped over 100 mobile games (Google Play & App Store), and successfully published Idle Coin Button and Grapple Fist, with over 2M downloads for each game. I've learned how to efficiently develop in a very fast paced environment, developing on average 1 prototype per week, with the actual times ranging from less than 1 day for my fastest prototype to a couple of days over a week for my slowest, without sacrificing quality in code in either case.

At the age of 21, in Teleperformance Greece, I was given the opportunity, which I took and thrived, to prove that leading a team of over 150 player support agents successfully, isn't about age, but about the mentality, mindset and desire to keep improving for the greater good of the team. My experience later as a Business Analyst for the Quality Assurance department of Teleperformance Greece, developing automations and optimizing workflows, proved my love for optimization was not just about coding, but also about business workflows! Taking a few years break from Teleperformance Greece to work for 5ive Games and then Meta, I am now back and currently employed as a QA Automations Engineer, specializing in developing bots using Kore.AI and Flow.AI, while also utilizing Python and Power Automate for custom automations used internally.

While in Meta Reality Labs (Oculus) in Zurich, I developed automated tests in Unity and Unreal Engine, as a QA Automations Engineer, for the upcoming updates of the Meta Quest VR headsets. This was an amazing opportunity to prove how well I can thrive in bigger development teams and where I stand within them. Through this experience, I had the chance to learn from other developers, to further sharpen my optimization skills and to further work on my team-leading skills. In addition, I was trusted with important decisions and took initiative for our team goals and method of operation, during 2-week sprints with the rest of the teams.

Throughout the years I've taken a lot of Freelance work with focus on Unity Programming projects, and have even worked with Helpshift for the testing of their latest Unity integration.

I've worked on personal projects since the age of 17, with my personal favourites being Afterthought, an FPS game set in a unique world that combined magic with modern weapons, inspired by Call of Duty campaigns, Diablo gameplay and Deus Ex. Together with Afterthought, I loved working on Scopophobia, a local multiplayer PC vs VR horror game, in which a scientist is in need of some rare samples that are protected by a humanoid monster, in a small forgotten village deep within the forest. Scopophobia has been thoroughly (re)designed and has evolved into Eclipse, a VR online co-op game in which up to 3 players work together to better understand what happened during the great Eclipse that affected humanity and created various different humanoid monsters. The players are asked to either successfully find, identify and capture or escape the monster. If there is no other choice or the nature of the monster doesn't allow it, the players must hunt the monster down and neutralize it.