Pedro M. A. Fernandes is currently enrolled in the PhD in Media Art and Communication, having been awarded a FCT-funded PhD studentship for his proposal which aims to look into the game design experiments that caracterize 2010s' new wave of independent horror games. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Videogames (final grade of 15), and a Master’s degree in Game Design and Playful Media which he finished in 2023 with a final grade of 18. His thesis, “Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment to Improve Player Experience in Games for Rehabilitation”, received a final evaluation of 19/20. As complementary education, he completed the Game Creator’s Odyssey program, created through a partnership between Concordia University (Canada) and the games publisher Ubisoft, obtaining a certificate for the game design methodologies employed at Ubisoft and other high-budget studios: Rational Game Design (2020) and Rational Level Design (2021). He currently works as a student researcher at Lusófona University’s HEI-Lab. Through the Bachelor’s degree, he was introduced to game development, learning several tools that are part of game development pipelines, including programing (C#), 3D modeling (Blender), sound design (Avid ProTools), UI (Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator), and development tools such as the Unity game engine. In the Master’s degree, he expanded his knowledge in game design, developing both analog, digital, and alternative controller (alt.ctrl) games that explored different design challenges as part of the course’s program. One of these projects, the alt.ctrl. game 'HexPong', has been featured in several conferences and events, including international games research conferences such as FDG (2023) and IEEE CoG (2023), and the European Researchers’ Night (2022 and 2023). During the Master’s degree, in 2021, he would be awarded a research scholarship to work at Lusófona University’s HEI-Lab research unit. Since then, he has worked in the FCT-financed PlayersAll research project (ref. EXPL/COM-OUT/0882/2021), designing a virtual reality game to complement upper-limb rehabilitation and gathering game design patterns that can assist in creating adaptive systems in games, the Horizon Europe-financed EPIC-WE project (ref. Nº101095058), conducting a systematic literature review (spanning from 2002 to 2023) on game jam organization practices, and the FCT-financed GameIN project (ref. 2022.07939.PTDC) adapting commercial analog games and creating playful activities that are accessible for people with intellectual disabilities to promote inclusion - contributing to the creation of a game kit that facilitates the creation of more of these activities. He has presented articles at some of the main conferences for games research such as Foundations on Digital Games and IEEE’s Conference on Games related to both these research projects and his own PhD work.