Karel Chabera

About

Modes/progression designer on EA College Football (Dynasty and Road to Glory) who has owned multiple shipped progression systems, including recruiting and Road to Glory progression (meters, in-game reward triggers, and a "coach trust" meta-progression). Focused on modular system design and tuning/balancing for player-facing challenges and rewards, with strong QA-driven iteration and Blueprint-based prototyping practices.

Experience

Key Strengths

• Shipped player-facing recruiting progression feature (tape score/challenges/scholarship thresholds) with tuning integration
• Strong systems tuning and balancing across varied gameplay contexts (different positions, challenge difficulty vs reward)
• Iterative development with QA/player feedback loops to reach shipping-quality polish
• Designs modular, reusable progression components (reusing recruiting framework for transfer portal)
• Blueprint prototyping approach using reusable base classes/components for fast iteration
• Structured debugging workflow in Blueprints (repro steps, breakpoints, targeted debug logs)
• Owned and shipped end-to-end mode features (Road To Glory components including High School Recruiting)
• Designed clear player-goal systems (Tape Score thresholds for scholarship offers)
• Strong tuning/iteration loop using playtests, external testing, and QA/team feedback
• Built rapid prototypes outside the game to validate tuning models before implementation
• Cross-functional leadership aligning engineering and UI/UX to ship features
• Adapted scope to technical/memory constraints while preserving player choice (templates vs deep customization)
• Shipped feature correlated with increased Road To Glory users and time spent YoY
• Owned and shipped an end-to-end in-game news/contextual storytelling feature (main menu league context)
• Built a unit-test-like content testing pipeline to validate every story/package for grammar, formatting, and data accuracy
• Optimized a generation algorithm to reduce memory footprint ~60% and improve performance ~70%
• Designed and shipped interconnected recruiting systems (prospect generation + high school recruiting) that increased Road to Glory engagement/time
• Strong systems balancing under tight memory constraints (recruit counts by position, tunable roster/pool values)
• Effective rapid iteration and pivoting late in production (reworked content to more compelling moment-to-moment scenarios)
• Blueprint prototyping workflow that scales (reusable base classes, derived variants, clear naming/modular functions) and transitions well to engineering
• Owned High School Recruiting feature end-to-end for EA College Football 26
• Scaled content delivery to 1,000+ unique challenges by leveraging/updating an existing minigames tool
• Built scripting in data tools to speed up designer iteration and in-game validation/testing
• Strong systems thinking: reusable base Blueprint architecture with data-table-driven configuration
• Pragmatic Blueprint-to-C++ migration strategy to reduce complexity and improve maintainability
• Methodical debugging: breakpoint-driven root cause analysis and robust, gated on-screen debug instrumentation
• Effective tradeoff management: pivoted content to fit tool constraints and ROI while maintaining experience goals