About

Hello! I am Jordan Yong, a game designer, programmer, and more recently also a VFX artist, with an interest in creating just about anything my brain can get its neurons on as well as experimenting with various ideas and concepts and stretching the extents I can take them in.

I graduated from DigiPen Institute of Technology with a Bachelors of Science in Programming and Game Design. As such, I have a healthy amount of experience in those fields, as well as adjacent ones.

In General

During my time at DigiPen, I have completed a sizeable number of team projects as either a designer or a programmer as my primary role. Because of small team sizes, however, my role was not limited to purely doing one or the other.

On many an occasion, I would need to learn whatever engine the project was to be worked on before anyone else - this was regardless of whether or not I was acting as a designer prototyping gameplay elements or as a programmer porting over code to a new language. When things got busy and there was more work to do than people for a particular role, I usually helped out in some ways that were in that field; for example, in Vára, I assisted the animators in implementing animation graphs and events while they were too busy developing assets.

As a Designer

What I care most about achieving as a designer is flow, both in and out of the game. Rather, I prefer having proper interpolation of UI and movements, responsive inputs, and keeping flow in an experience.

I specialize in level and systems design, capable of churning out whiteboxed levels and prototypes for either structures or a customizable enemy script. In particular, I am fond of experimenting with various components, seeing what possibilities I can construct with each part that the team is created. I’m happy to converse with playtesters, programmers, and other designers about what to improve in a given level or what I should add to a system we’re working on, with these talks usually leading me to make those changes immediately.

UI and UX isn’t out of my field of expertise either, having experimented with and created projects that focused on both of these design types; in general, I prefer rounded UI elements that smoothly appear in disappear in adherence to my ideas on flow in experience.

As a Programmer

I prefer keeping my code organized and segmented through object oriented programming, not only because it is easier on the eyes, but because of the ability to work on different scripts at once as if they were different buckets that don’t need to rely on the other pieces of code I have opened.

I have a high proficiency with Unity C# in particular, as that is the engine used for the majority of my solo projects. Of the games I have worked on, I have programmed 2D platformers, poetic experiences, shoot ‘em ups, and experimental genre games.

I am also quite proficient with C++, having worked on a number of small coding projects like a MinMax Amazons AI and a memory manager. One of my team projects, Cat & Bird, also ran on a custom engine using glut in C++. I am at the very least confident in not creating memory leaks through bad usage of pointers.

In terms of Unreal 4, I am less proficient but still fully capable of understanding and using blueprints, having prototyped the core gameplay loop of one of my games Vára, and working together with the programmers of the team in order to polish and connect the systems I made to added animations and accomodate changes in the system.

As an Artist

I’ve been drawing, creating pixel art, and animating for several years even before I got into making games. As a result, I’ve created art assets for several group projects where we did not have an art team as well as all of my solo projects.

My understanding of the process by which artists develop and implement assets allow me to work well together with artists and even assist in importing assets and linking them together with the existing game objects (such as helping with animation graphs).

I have taken an interest in doing VFX recently partially because of the desire to create neat effects for personal projects, but also because I had learned that the role of a VFX artist requires a good amount of art knowledge, programming capability, and some design skills - a mix of disciplines that I had. Currently, I am experimenting with Unity’s VFX and Shader Graphs - both are quite similar to Unreal’s blueprints when it comes to visualizing code, so it was quite comfortable starting out.

My focus with particles has been to create decently good looking effects while limiting myself to about 200-300 particles at the maximum. This is a good test for performance and working under constraints as I learn how to work with these tools, rather than just throwing particles at the screen until it looks pretty.