GAME DESIGNER · SYSTEMS · LEVELS · LIVE ITERATION

Yuxuan Qiu

Design the loop. Read the player.

My work

Harbor Rush

A shipped mobile hex-board strategy game about building, spawning, capturing territory, and reading a battle in under three minutes.

Harbor Rush battle showing the red and blue territory front line CAPTURE
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Harbor Rush victory scene with connected blue buildings BUILD
ROLE Game Designer Systems, onboarding, telemetry, and live iteration

What I worked on

  • Telemetry Extended instrumentation requirements alongside tutorial and progression changes.
  • Data quality Validated funnels and retention signals before using them as design evidence.
  • Live iteration Turned player signals into testable design questions and iteration plans.
  • Cross-functional delivery Connected design, engineering, data, QA, and publishing through specifications and acceptance criteria.

Wingstrike

A vertical shooter shaped through encounter pacing, level configuration, FTUE readability, and level-generation workflows.

These three clips document product-direction experiments and prototype iterations. They are not presented as final shipped gameplay.

ROLEGame Designer
  • Level design Tuned enemy composition, wave length, boss order, difficulty, and telegraphs.
  • Product direction Proposed the initial three-choice vertical-shooter structure.
  • Content ownership Built early Red Box configuration and ten handcrafted levels.
  • Content review Checked generated level content against pacing and readability constraints before production use.

Playable games

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About

I'm Yuxuan Qiu, a game designer in the San Francisco Bay Area. At FirstFun I was the primary designer on shipped mobile games, owning systems, economy, onboarding and the telemetry used to tune them. I have a computer science degree and a Master of Game Design from Northeastern, and I build my own prototypes in Unity and Godot.

Portrait of Yuxuan Qiu

Earlier work

Earlier visual, systems, and game-making studies that show how my design practice developed.