Lea Liu‘s Relevant Experience as a
Game Designer
I have been studying game design in both my bachelor and master years. During this period, I have joined many game development projects, roughly divided into three categories:
The first are those quick and dirty video games produced within days or weeks, like The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Personal Space, and Beaver'n Beaver. They all started with one elegant idea and required us to prototype, iterate and test them in tight cycles. Working in these projects improved my skill to make ideas happened and push them into concrete games, in a word, they improved my design skill.
The second are those long term projects like Monsterologist and The Memory of the Red Mansion, which are still being actively developed. Unlike those short term games above, the core game mechanics are only the bones, and we have to add more contents as the meat, such as plots, items, characters, monsters. As a designer in these projects, I was also responsible for documenting all the design details and managing the work schedules. It is important to take a step beyond the design to make sure these games are rich in contents and plays. Working in these projects improved my skill to refine and iterate the designs over time, they are more likely to horn my development skills.
The last but not least are the board games like Treehouse Tribes and many short term board game projects during my study in NYU Game Center. The uniqueness of these projects was they were all built upon pure game play rules. There were no fancy graphics or controls to cover the holes of game mechanic. Working in these projects improved my skill to explore the game design space in its most pure form.
Listed below are the details of mentioned projects and other related works I engaged in.
A board game when prototyping
Featured Projects
Monsterologist
August 30, 2016
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Responsible for designing items and crafting systems. Made sure the subsystems in the game work together to enforce the core game play.
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Responsible for defining monster system and designing monsters. Designed their traits and living places.
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Improved the attribute model of the game. Iterated on those random attributes added during prototyping and turned them into an inter-connecting model.
The Memory of the Red Mansion
July 01, 2012
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Defined the storytelling structure as modular story groups. Sorted the stories in the original novel into modules and defined the transitions between them.
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Drew the diagrams of story modules.
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Designed the attribute model that leads to different endings based on player interactions.
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Wrote the story scripts.
Personal Space
April 07, 2017
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Defined the game as an abstract simulation of human relationship.
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Designed the indicator of un-easiness value. Used colors and areas to indicate personal space.
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Sketched out three different types of stages. Designed the immersive tutorial.
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Planned some future designs such as multiple objectives and monetizing in the least intrusive ways.
