Latent Image
A forest built to get you lost, and a camera that only photographs the past.
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.
Projects
Glimmer
The more you’re hurt, the darker and narrower your vision, until friends and small kindnesses light the world back up.
Room Numbers
The generator carries two circuits, and a door code can only be read in a lit room. The puzzle is deciding what to leave in the dark.
More projects
TravelerA criminal walks the line between heaven and hell, with moral choice carried by exploration instead of menus.
BolastaGrid tactics built around one irreversible choice: feed the Devourer one of your two skills, or you do not pass.
CAMIA friendly AI companion concept, from user research to interface, framed around misinformation and AI anxiety.
Picnic Panic!An ant-inspired cooperative board game: gather food and survive the backyard before the storm hits.
Other works3
Experience
- 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
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.
- Projects
- 10
- Game jams
- 2
- Steam release
- 1
Tools
- Unity
- C#
- C++
- Java
- Figma
- Git
Let’s connect
Open to game design and development internships. Email is fastest; LinkedIn works too.
yubao9527@gmail.com