GAMEPLAY / AI / GRAPHICS
Zhiyang Ying应志杨
Game Developer / Los Angeles · University of Southern California
Focused on gameplay, AI, and graphics. Pursuing an M.S. in Computer Science (Game Development) at USC, building interactive worlds through code.
Selected work
01 — 06Team projects
01 / Lead ProgrammerMay 2026 — Present
The Man I Invented
First-person sci-fi action survival · USC MFA thesis
Building extensible gameplay systems, from character combat and persistent world state to modular first-person animation.
Project overview & technical details
- Built data-driven character and equipment systems in C++ with GAS. PlayerState owns the player ASC; equipment swaps grant and revoke abilities for input, firing, ammunition, reloading, and damage. Extended a shared projectile base for repair and explosive rounds.
- Designed a component-based persistence framework using GameInstanceSubsystem, persistent GUIDs, and a custom state interface, supporting runtime reconstruction, permanent-destruction records, and state restoration.
- Built a shared enemy-combat base for ASC, attributes, and abilities, with humanoid, nightmare, and boss variants. Reused AI through dynamic behavior subtrees and selected abilities by phase and distance, including invisibility and area barrages.
- Created skeleton-independent animation templates and weapon-specific Linked Anim Layers. Coordinated separate arms, visible legs, and full-body shadows, with bone-driven leaning and spring-damped weapon lag.
- Decoupled combat from audiovisual feedback with Gameplay Tags and Gameplay Cues, integrating Niagara, blood decals, spatial audio, and camera shake.
02 / Gameplay EngineerSep 2025 — May 2026
Wok This Way
Online multiplayer shooter · USC MFA thesis
Implemented Steam lobbies and server-authoritative weapons, improving the multiplayer experience under high latency.
Project overview & technical details
- Integrated Steam Online Subsystem for lobby creation, joining, and match-start flow.
- Synchronized firing, weapon state, and character interactions through RPCs and property replication, with server-side trajectory, collision, and damage validation.
- Tuned network smoothing and interpolation to reduce position snapping and visual pulling under high latency.
Personal projects
03 / Personal projectJan 2026 — Present
Infernal
Single-player third-person action RPG · Game AI
Teaching AI to learn from player behavior and discover combat strategies in nonlinear levels.
Project overview & technical details
- Collected player behavior trajectories with Unreal Learning Agents and trained a Boss behavior-cloning model through imitation learning.
- Designed a multidimensional reward function and trained a reinforcement-learning agent to autonomously learn combat strategies in nonlinear levels.
04 / Personal projectSep 2025
3D Rendering in C++
Ray tracing & software rasterization
Implemented graphics rendering pipelines from scratch, accelerating ray tracing with a BVH structure.
Project overview & technical details
- Implemented a ray tracer and BVH acceleration structure in C++, improving rendering performance by approximately 30×.
- Implemented a software rasterizer simulating the complete graphics rendering pipeline.
05 / Personal projectNov 2025
Procedural Universe
Environment simulation · Unity shaders
Creating planetary environments with procedural biomes, seamless textures, and atmospheric effects.
Project overview & technical details
- Wrote custom HLSL shaders for elevation-based biome layering and natural terrain transitions.
- Implemented randomized-sampling triplanar mapping with FBM noise to eliminate texture repetition on spherical surfaces.
- Integrated the lighting pipeline and used the Fresnel effect to simulate atmospheric scattering around planetary silhouettes.
Game Jam
06 / Lead ProgrammerGame Jam
Ratchet It Up Game Jam
Graduate division winner
Gyroscope-controlled gravity lets players and enemies move across walls, floors, and ceilings.
Project overview & technical details
- Integrated the DualSense gyroscope and used quaternions to control gravity direction and enable dynamic gravity switching.
- Refactored camera and movement for non-Z-up environments. Replaced NavMesh with gravity-plane tracing so enemies can traverse walls, floors, and ceilings.
Experience
EXPERIENCESeaSun Games
Game Development Intern
May 2026 — Aug 2026
AI NPC module & MOD tool development
- Implemented an MCP Server in Unity supporting SSE and Streamable HTTP, using reflection to register tools dynamically and connect external AI agents to the game runtime for querying, debugging, and evaluation.
- Built NPC debugging and evaluation tools with unified test-case loading, assertions, layered diagnostics, and result persistence for regression tests and retrieval-pipeline comparisons.
- Delivered a .NET and MongoDB vector-retrieval service with automated ingestion, exact matching, semantic retrieval, and graceful fallback to resolve natural-language descriptions to Unity scene objects and drive NPC behavior.
- Developed a MOD texture-replacement tool and its in-game integration, supporting asset scanning, model previews, and texture replacement.
Education & honors
BACKGROUNDEducation
University of Southern California
M.S. Computer Science (Game Development)
Expected May 2027 · Los Angeles
Shenyang Jianzhu University
B.Eng. Computer Science and Technology
Oct 2020 — Jun 2024 · Shenyang
Honors
PlayStation Career Path Scholarship
Sony Interactive Entertainment
Recognizing potential and achievement in game development.
Ratchet It Up Game Jam
Graduate division winner · Lead Programmer
View project ↑Skills
TOOLKIT- Languages
- C++ / Python / Blueprints
- Engines & tools
- Unreal Engine 5 / Unity / Rider / Visual Studio / VS Code / PyCharm / Photoshop / Codex / Claude Code
- Version control
- Perforce / Git / SVN