Welcome to my portfolio

My name is David Zhou and I am a aspiring Game Designer

This website showcases a variety of projects I have worked on.

Games

Here is a selection of games I worked on as Programmer and Designer

Click on any image to see more information about the game

Charlie

This project was the Major Project of my final year. The game was made by a team of three and is the first dive into 3D game design for every member.

The game revolves around a young child called Charlie who finds himself in an alternate world. This world is colorless and full of dangerous entities. Now it is up to Charlie to solve the mysteries of the colorless world and find a way home.

I split my duties with another team member and together we were responsible for programming and game design. I was in charge of designing the shooting mechanic of the player, the different abilities of the arrows and the interactive objects in the world. This also coincides with me being responsible for the majority of the level design. As this was our first proper 3D game, I struggled with Level Design for quite a while, because I wanted to fill the world with as many interactions as possible, however, due to time constraints as well as multiple creative blockades, I decided to make the level progression more linear instead of trying to design a space with unlimited freedom. I oriented myself on games like the Super Mario Galaxy series, which feature linear level progression while allowing the player to explore the space we provide. In the end, during the LCC 2023 Graduate showcase, people seemed to enjoy this sort of progression, so I am very happy with the result. However, in the future, I may consider trying to redesign the levels in the future.

Mori

This was a 2nd year project in University. We were supposed to create a game with three levels. The first and second levels had a pre-made layout, while the third level was to be designed entirely by the students.

We were assigned in teams of 2 to collaborate with 2 Game Art Students. After some brainstorming, my Game Design partner and I came up with the main designs of altering the environment and cannons as the main travel and puzzle solving mechanics. I took inspiration for the environment mechanic from a small Indie game called "Liar Princess and the blind prince" where the main protagonist can change between wolf form and human form and has different abilities for each form. I turned this concept on its head and designed the mechanic around the environment of the player "changing form".

As a team, we settled having cannons firing the player in a straight line, while the environment change would see a change in seasons, from winter to summer and reversed. Additionally, certain interactions would only occur during a specific season, like enemies being frozen and "neutralized" during winter or mushrooms appearing to add your progression through the level during the summer. To cut time, we decided to have every game asset be a sprite and manipulate its scaling to show them either during summer or winter. Additionally, the sprites itself had less saturation than usual, because we decided to use post processing and lighting to convey the current season.

This was also my first contact with shader graph, which should prove useful during my final year project Charlie.

Border of Death

This game was made during Bullet Hell Jam 2023. It draws heavy inspiration from Project Touhou, a videogame franchise made by ZUN.
For this particular game, I wanted to recreate the bullet patterns seen in Touhou boss fights, because they offer a special challenge due to their bullet pattern.

Root

This project was made for the Global Game Jam 2023. I was part of a team of 6 and the lead programmer. The game was created over a span of 6 days with some complications due to multiple members falling ill.

The game itself is about a small plant in a boot who is exploring London, starting all the way down from the sewers and making it to the top of the London Eye at the end. The plant can stretch itself to grapple onto distant objects and pull himself towards them or overshoot it.

Dr. Death

Global Game Jam 2022 Game.
The theme for the game Jam was "Duality". I came up with the idea of a morbid doctor who kills his patients instead of saving them. The main character is heavily inspired by an actual serial killer called Harold Frederick Shipman, a serial killer doctor who killed his patients.

Dr. Death has the player take on the role of a doctor with a hidden urge to kill his patients instead of helping them. The player is able to choose between saving people or killing them. Depending on the choices of the player, a different ending is achieved.

The base structure of the game was coded in a single day due to time restraints. This is also the reason why the game is on the simpler side, because we were a team of two who both were only able to attend 3 of the 5 total days of the game jam.

.pro-gallery-wix-wrapper {display: block !important;} .pro-gallery-wix-wrapper .gallery-item-container {opacity: 1 !important; display: block !important;}

About Me

"Giving back" has been a basic principle of my life and is the main motivation for me to pursue a career in the games industry. After being introduced to games, I have since dreamt of fantastic worlds and found myself adventuring in them. After being exposed to programming in London during my time at University of the Arts London, I believe I am ready to start my path in the games industry.

I am fluent in not only English, German and Chinese, but also in C#. I have also a good understanding of programming logic and am currently learning new C languages. Apart from that, I am interested in the theoretical approach to game design. And, of course, I love games.

Download CV

Contact Information

david2001zhou@gmail.com

Twitter