Who Am I ?

I’m William Xie. I’m from China and am currently studying at Cal. I mark myself as a gamer and a game developer. I have been doing (and studying) game development for two years.

What Can I Do ?

I am familiar with the game engine Unity. I am capable with editor tool development, gameplay scripting and shader writing. I can do both 2D and 3D game development.

I also have experiences of mobile application development for Android and HTML5 games development.

I use C# as my primary programming language, and am familiar with Java and Javascript. I can also do Python, C and C++ (but I am more willing to use unsafe mode in C#😉)

I can also make simple music loops and demos using Garageband. I can play a little bit of e-guitar and the same for piano (but not good at both of them).

What Have I Done ?

I have developed a series of prank games based on my high school life and posted on the unofficial website NFLS.IO. Unfortunately, we stop maintaining the site after July 2019. Many of these games are open-sourced on GitHub under the organization of NFLS.IO’s name.

I have also participated in Ludum Dare game jam for two times, with 1 game finished. You can check it here, and the game is open-sourced on my GitHub page.

I have also made a plugin for Unity which enables developers to read input from gamepads and control the rumbling of gamepads on multiple operating systems (which means you can use your Xbox One Controller on macOS with rumble function supported). It is based on another game development framework SDL2, written in C.

Besides, I have been written blogs on my game development experiences or tech problems I have met and solved at this site. Sadly, most of the blogs are written in Chinese as my mother tongue is Chinese😂.

What Are My Current Plans ?

I am now working on a custom render pipeline of Unity using the new SRP api. My goal is to implement a tile-based light culling render pipeline, which has a forward+ render path. This pipeline aims to highly optimize the performance of games which have 200+ lights on the screen at the same time. The project is open-sourced here. I have already finished the light culling system and is now implementing the cascaded shadowmap.

I am also doing research on procedural animation, which is a technique that generates animation assets without too much artists’ efforts and has been used in games like Overgrowth and Assassin’s Creed (and actually many of Ubisoft titles), including more advanced IK solving, foot/limb placement which fits multiple scenerios and locomotion animations by providing a few key frames.

Some Facts About Me

My current favorite game is Super Mario Odyssey.

The game I played the most is The Legand of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

The game I played for the most fun is Super Smash Bros series.

My favorite indie game is Super Hot.

I’m also a Dark Souls fan.

How To Contact Me

My GitHub page is https://github.com/GuardHei.

My Itch.io page is https://guardhei.itch.io.

My email is williamxie168@berkeley.edu

My Discord username is william.x#4456.