A Day in Black is a VR game created for Oculus VR. In the game, players are deprived of visual cues completely. The players will use the left thumbstick to move and the right thumbstick to rotate. However, in entirely dark, players lose track of their directions quickly. When their controllers collide with walls, they will start vibrating, which tells players that they run into obstacles. Players need to use that to navigate in the completely dark maze and reach a hidden goblet to clear the game. When players reach the goblet, the whole scene will be lit up so that they can go back and see how simple the maze is. To simplify the testing process and reduce the difficulty, we also added a cheat function -- Players can turn on flashlights in their hands by pressing down the thumbsticks.

I created this game with a friend. We contributed equally to designing and programming. We wanted the game to be a mirror world of how blind people view the world. When we talk about the mirror world and other fancy concepts relating to VR, it is always about transforming our “ordinary realities” into cooler virtual realities. However, what we see as ordinary may be a privilege to others. We want to use this project to explore new ways of designing VR experience. We also want to use the game to ask players to show more respect and care to minority people.

Source Code: https://github.com/tyc980708/A-Day-In-Black

Minzi is a unity game made for a game design competition held by Netease Games. I was the designer and musician. In Chinese characters, there are components called radicals that can be combined with some characters to form many new characters. Thus, I designed a game about fighting enemies using the combined characters. Players can collect different characters from the ground, buy it from the shop, and get it from battles. The combined characters have different usage based on their meaning in Chinese.

Star Fantasy is a game I created with a friend on a game jam called train jam. The jam was held on a train traveled from Chicago to San Francisco in 52 hours. My friend worked mainly as the programmer of our project. I worked as the designer, musician, and also story writer. Due to the loss of internet access and the time limit, our best option was to develop a game from templates that my friend had learned. Thus, I designed the game based on a shooting game template, like Space Invaders. To fit the theme, I intended to make the bullets go through a circular path before they hit enemies. To make the game more interesting instead of simple template-based shooting games, I wrote a complicated story about samsara to fit the theme of circuitous and made the game a text-based adventure game plus shooting game. Also, to utilize our advantage as Chinese designers, we included both Chinese and English scripts for our stories in the game. The game is eventually named Star Fantasy, which is the combination of our favorite movie series Star Wars and favorite game series Final Fantasy.