Joshua
Lai.賴祖翹

What I owned

• Blockouts for 7+ Adventure mode levels, from first layout to final logic.
• Level scripting that ties everything together in each space: UI prompts, characters, NPCs and progression gates that decide when the player can move on.
• The 3Cs of the playable character in Adventure mode: how the character moves, how the camera follows and how the controls feel.

How I worked

With a team of 100+ across in-house staff and outsourcers, most of my job was making sure a level still played as intended after it passed through many hands. I worked directly with programmers and artists to improve the level pipeline we'd inherited, so later levels were faster to build and easier to hand off.

Official screenshots

What I owned

• Research and design documents for five VR player interactions, written so engineers and animators could build from them.
• Playable Blueprint prototypes of four or more core mechanics, tested in headset rather than argued about on paper.
• The prototype review meetings, each ending with a short list of action points for the next iteration.

Why it matters

In VR, a mechanic that reads well in a document can feel wrong the moment it's in your hands. Prototyping fast and reviewing every build kept the team deciding from playtests instead of opinions.

Official screenshots

What I owned

The character's core moveset, from first Blueprint prototype to final tuning, plus the item stats and player-feel values that decide how hard the desert is.

1. Research the genrePlayed and broke down the core loops of leading survival games against specific research questions, then turned the findings into action points for our design.
2. Build the character and controlsPrototyped each movement feature in Blueprints, tested it, and iterated with animation, programming and sound. Built a gym level so the whole team could test and debug movement in one place.
3. Design rope climbingDesigned the rope-climbing mechanic with our programmers, documenting its intended behavior and limits so everyone built toward the same thing.
4. Balance and QA through early accessBalanced player systems and resource data tables, ran beta tests with outside players, and kept game-breaking bugs reported and moving through the QA pipeline.

From the build

Players playing it

Content creators picked Arid up during early access. Their videos showed us where players got lost or frustrated, which fed straight into UI, flow and quality-of-life fixes.

I joined mid-production, when the core idea had a gap: players had no reason to collect their minions. Fixing that, then turning it into a level, was my job. The game shipped feature-complete on itch.io after eight weeks, made remotely during the pandemic.

1. Give the crowd a purposeBroke down the minion-gathering feature, laid out its current flaws with possible fixes, and ran focused brainstorms that each tackled one problem.
2. Build a metric gymSet up a gym with every interactable and all movement values, so jump distances and minion behavior could be measured, not guessed.
3. Go from sketch to snippetSketched small gameplay moments on paper, then built them in engine with a custom Blueprint that let testers jump between snippets.
4. Assemble and playtest the levelSorted the snippets by difficulty and interest to build the onboarding level, then playtested it toward a gradual difficulty curve.
5. Track every iterationLogged each significant change with the reason behind it, so the team could see why the level looked the way it did.
6. Protect it through the art passKept the intended moments intact as art went in, adding blocking volumes so props couldn't break movement.

From the build

The bars that close in on the cover above are a nod to the switch effect I built for this game: black borders that slam in when the perspective flips, so the change lands with weight.

1. Idea to pitchRan divergent and convergent brainstorms, set the vision, and broke the concept into mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics. We had a playable prototype of the core within a week.
2. Prototype the 3CsExplored what the perspective switch could do, defined the character's feel against references like FEZ and Portal, and worked closely with the gameplay programmer and character artist.
3. Build the levelsWith no dedicated level designer on the team, I built the onboarding level and a second level that expands on the switch, planned pacing in a spreadsheet and playtested both systematically.
4. Give the switch impactDesigned and implemented the black-border transition and camera change in Blueprints.

From the build

Design focus

The prototype is visually rough by design: the emphasis is the playable space. The footage shows how the environment alternates between narrow routes, open industrial volumes, vertical structures and points of interest to keep the player scanning the space while moving forward.

• Built and iterated the grapple logic until swinging felt dependable at speed.
• Exposed the grapple's metrics as public variables, so range, pull and timing could be tuned without touching the logic.
• Built the onboarding level that teaches grappling and the dimension jump.
• Documented the core design principles and the player behavior each level should encourage.

Streets of Red: Devil's Dare Deluxe

Prepared the game for localization by stripping baked-in text from sprites and UI elements, and playtested the 2018 content update. Steam page

Dusty Raging Fist

My first assignment: played the full game through several times and logged feedback and bugs in Trello ahead of its Switch release.

Buglords (unreleased, PS4)

Playtested gameplay and menus, and built a placeholder UI system in C# as my learning assignment: my first time inside a large Unity project.