David BaoGame designer & developer, USC

Stories told through systems.

USC game design sophomore. Usability Lead on a Steam-shipped title, building narrative games in Unity.

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Latent ImageGlimmerRoom Numbers

Projects

Latest work first. Each project opens a case study with my role, process, and footage.

First-person · Navigation2026

Latent Image

A first-person navigation game in a night forest where every direction looks the same. The instant camera you carry only photographs the past: each print develops into the afternoon she walked through, with the path and the red ribbons she tied. The game is learning to find that way again in the dark.

  • Solo
  • Course Project
  • Narrative
  1. The rule

    Every photo is a view of the past, and there is only so much film.

  2. What the player feels

    At first you photograph everything. By the end you can walk by her marks alone.

  3. What it says

    Every map had her in it. Finding the way out was finding her all along.

itch.io

Narrative · Puzzle2026

Glimmer

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.

  • Team of 2
  • Narrative
  • Systems
  1. The rule

    Mood is light. Friends raise it, bullies drain it, and every level you climb is kept.

  2. What the player feels

    At your lowest you are fast and strong, and you can barely see a thing.

  3. What it says

    Strength alone does not get you out. The last door opens for the people behind you.

itch.io

First-person · Puzzle2026

Room Numbers

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.

  • Solo Dev
  • Course Project
  • Systems
  1. The rule

    Two circuits for eight rooms, and a code only shows in a room that is lit.

  2. What the player feels

    Every light you turn on is paid for with a dark room somewhere else.

  3. What it says

    Light is a budget, and a night shift is a string of choices you cannot take back.

itch.io

Narrative · Moral Choice2026

Traveler

A Unity 3D narrative game about a criminal choosing a path toward heaven or hell, exploring moral choice through exploration and story beats.

  • Team of 2
  • Choice
  • 3D
itch.io

Tactics · Systems Design · In development2026

Bolasta

A turn based grid tactics game built around one irreversible choice. A Devourer blocks the corridor and opens its mouth: feed it one of your two skills or you do not pass. The greyed icon stays in your bar for the rest of the run, the second half is still winnable but twice as long and three times as costly, and the last fight is the Devourer using what it ate against you.

  • Solo
  • Grid tactics
  • Wordless UI
itch.io

Design & tabletop

Interaction Design2024

CAMI

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.

Board Game2024

Picnic Panic!

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.

Other works3

Arcade · Eco-Satire2026

Fishitting

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.

itch.io

Environmental Storytelling2025

After They’re Gone

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.

itch.io

2D · Pixel · Shooter2024

Overtale

A 2D pixel-art platform shooter made in Unity: move, jump, and shoot through compact levels built around readable combat and flow.

itch.io

Experience

Usability Lead

Sisyphus’s Worst Day (again)

USC Advanced Games Project (AGP)

Aug 2025 to May 2026

Shipped on Steam, Jul 2026LinkedIn
  • Led usability across a year-long, 50+-person student game production: 50+ playtests, plus regular studio-wide “Everybody Tests” coordinated with the design and engineering leads.
  • Synthesized playtester observations into categorized, actionable issue reports routed to the right design and engineering channels, covering onboarding, camera controls, level readability, fail states, and difficulty pacing.
  • Surfaced recurring UX problems that drove concrete changes, like defaulting the camera to a zoomed-out view after players struggled with manual zoom, and flagging tutorial gaps and late-level difficulty spikes ahead of gold master.

About

David Bao at Ubisoft Shanghai

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.

Let’s connect

Open to game design and development internships. Email is fastest; LinkedIn works too.

yubao9527@gmail.com
LinkedInResume (PDF)