My name is Yukai Liu, and I graduated from the University of Santa Cruz with a Computer Science Game Design Major. I am an international student and willing to relocate.

Please feel free to contact me about anything, jobs, game design, or level design. I love hearing feedback and chats from people. I am willing to work full-time, part-time, or internship, as long as the job role is related to Game Design!

Game Designing ​Academic Experience                                                                       

    My studies have included Game Design/Dev, Game Research (Both modern and historical), Game System analysis, level design, etc.

I am familiar with game development and game user experience. I also have multiple game design experiences during college and personal life, either in individual development or teamwork, the projects are listed on my portfolio websites. During my experience, I believe that I have grasped the principles of my major and skills of practice.

    One of my favorite games I designed is called Spirit Kin. This is an action game built in Unity with 11 other game developers. In our game, gamers can play as a sword-hacking apprentice who fights corrupted spirits in order to save a cursed village. The player will need to use their spirit sword to purify spirit-haunting hotspots around the map before those spots become cursed forever. I worked on the team as a level designer and Scene designer.

     As a level designer, I need to pay attention to the details of the game and I collaborate with our programmers and artists, using different tools, such as adobe photoshop, illustrator, and Visio, to create efficient and easy-to-understand visual documents. I designed the basic frame of the game map layout and decorated the game scene with the assets artists provide. I also worked with combat programmers to design the buff, curse, and skill system in unity, and help to design the character's motion design. I used the mind map to design the logic of the buff and curse system, to create the balance and reinforcement loop. Moreover, I independently designed and script the floating lantern scene for our game which gain appreciation from the gamers.  I have learned a lot about game design in unity from this experience.

Game Industry Experience                                                                                                

For chasing my dream in the game industry, I am currently working in 2 game studios as a Game designer and level designer for creating games targeting different groups of people. 

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   The first game studio I am working with is a non-profit organization as a Game level designer for creating an adventure mobile game targeting kids aged 6 to 12. This is a Narrative Decision-Based Adventure Mobile Game called Unscrolled, and the story of Frances, the main character, who learns about life while searching for what it means to be Jewish.  An adventurous journey allows kids to build decision-making skills and concretize their values. This game currently is in an early development stage, and we are still creating the gameplay-level prototype, and preparing for the first beta launch, but the concept has been set up. My Job there is for helping the lead designer use Unity to create the puzzle level design, balance the gameplay system, and generate various ideas for the game in the document. In the current stage, I have worked with programmers to build a gear puzzle mini-games and a boat endless runner mini-game. I created the GDD and did the level design for these two games. I also did the animation implementation with the art team. 

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    The second one is a start-up educational company called Alter learning. Alter Learning is an Educational Gaming Platform dedicated to transforming the latest in scientific research in Educational learning management systems. The colleagues I’ve been working with are from all over the place, some are from Italy, some are from India, and some are from the US. I have been working on two projects in the game design team. Both projects are MVPs(minimum viable products). The first project is called Paper Weather, it is a strategy game that help player understand the power of different extreme weather, I did the level design and gameplay mechanics iteration. The second project is called Marine Biology, a VR game that provides players with an immersive undersea experience and learning about different Marine Creatures. I did the scene design and gameplay mechanics iteration with the lead game designer as well.

Gaming Experience                                                                                                                

    I am a gamer for over 20 years and have played at least hundreds of games so far. My favorite genres of game are role-playing and Metroidvania, such as The Witcher 3, RDR2, Souls Like Series, God of War, Hollow Knight, Blasphemous, etc.; I also like different exquisite indie games, such as Gorogoa, Celeste, Hades, Braid, etc BTW, I have been an NBA fan since I was a child, and I have been devoted to playing NBA2K video games for over 15 years.

    As a Gamer, I love the experience of pursuing full achievements in the game, since I think this way can help me to understand what exactly the design/dev team wants to bring to gamers, and then I can fully taste the game design logic behind the development. Please refer to the My Steam homepage for details.

    In addition to playing games, I like to watch or listen to various game-related videos or podcasts, analyze game mechanics, read game design books, and also chat with different people, and understand their game experiences. With all these experiences, I wish can devote myself to the gaming industry and design games.