David Bao Game designer & developer, USC
USC game design sophomore. Usability Lead on a Steam-shipped title, building narrative games in Unity.
Latest work first. Each project opens a case study with my role, process, and footage.
A 2D narrative puzzle about school bullying, where a girl's vision brightens or dims with her mood. Notes, mementos, and blue-ghost friends restore her spirit, turning an emotion-driven brightness system into the core mechanic and the story itself.
A game-jam game about a fish leashed to a polluted seabed, scavenging scrap to power up its light. Fend off troublemaking fish (the game's called Fishitting for a reason), and the brighter the light grows, the bigger the crowd it draws, until their weight snaps your rope. The twist: freed at last, the fish surfaces only to die in the polluted water anyway.
A Unity 3D narrative game about a criminal choosing a path toward heaven or hell, exploring moral choice through exploration and story beats.
A friendly AI companion concept explored through user research, personas, journey mapping, information architecture, wireframes, and interface design, framed around real-world conversations about misinformation and AI anxiety.
An ant-inspired cooperative board game: escape the storm, gather food, and survive backyard hazards, built around movement, combat, items, rivals, and clear win/lose conditions.
A first-person puzzle game about a night shift in a facility running on backup power. The generator carries only two circuits at a time, so lighting the room you need means cutting the light somewhere else, and every door code is a number you can only read while its room is lit.
A 3D Unity game about robots salvaging a world without humans: a dystopian city where sanitation falls entirely to machines, told through exploration and environmental storytelling.
A 2D pixel-art platform shooter made in Unity: move, jump, and shoot through compact levels built around readable combat and flow.
I'm a sophomore at USC studying game design. I'm most passionate about storytelling and system design: emotion and meaning, expressed through rules, loops, and feedback players can actually feel.
I care most when mechanics and narrative pull the same direction: clear systems, and story beats that land because the design earns them, not just the script.
Lately that's Unity: small prototypes where I test narrative and systems in the same build and iterate fast.
I'm always learning from games that marry story with systems, and I'd love to meet others who care about that mix too.
Open to game design and development internships. Email is fastest; LinkedIn works too.
yubao9527@gmail.com