Programmer · Game & System Designer

Lizhuoyuan Wan

I build systems, games, and interactive experiences — from large-scale MMORPG servers to mechanic-driven prototypes.

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About

I'm a programmer and designer who combines system thinking, gameplay feel, and technical implementation — building things that are logically consistent under the hood and engaging to interact with.

Skills

Programming & architecture design
Game / system mechanics design
Documentation & case-study writing

What I value

Clear logic and clean structure
Player / user experience
Long-term maintainability

Selected Work

Overview of all projects. Filter by discipline or status, open a card for the full case.

Hush — VALORANT sound Initiator concept: key art and 3D ability demo

Hush — VALORANT Agent Concept

Sound Initiator · Design Spec

A VALORANT Initiator built around sound as an information layer: relay real sounds elsewhere, tag movement through walls, silence footsteps, and sweep a site with a moving scan. Written as a design spec with a live 3D demo of every ability.

Hush — concept art — Concept art and frames from the interactive demo: Echo Relay, Sounding, Requiem.

Echo Relay demo — real sounds replayed at the relay — Concept art and frames from the interactive demo: Echo Relay, Sounding, Requiem.

Design & Planning

C · Echo Relay: a dormant, invisible beacon that, once activated, replays every sound near Hush at its own position for 12 s, then bursts to deafen and concuss.
Q · Sounding: a 70° sector wave through walls; anyone tagged is Resonant for 5 s and drops a snapshot marker whenever they move.
E · Muffle: a stim-style beacon; allies who step in get 8 s of silent footsteps that persist after leaving the field.
X · Requiem: a 12 m disc that advances 30 m through walls, painting a ripple for every enemy movement inside it.

Open the interactive spec

Vael'thar, the Loom-Warden

WoW Raid Encounter · Design Spec

A 20-player raid boss built on a memory mechanic: the floor shows a pattern, hides it, and resolves on it seconds later. Three stages and an intermission, with difficulty-aware values, role filters, a cast timeline, a playable Pattern Lock grid and a 3D replay of every stage.

Encounter page: contents, infobox with the playable Pattern Lock grid — The encounter page and 3D replays of Stage Two, the intermission and Stage Three.

Stage Two replay — Pattern Lock resolving on the grid — The encounter page and 3D replays of Stage Two, the intermission and Stage Three.

Design & Planning

Pattern Lock: twelve safe tiles are shown for 4 s and hidden for 6 s, then Tighten hits every player off a safe tile for 60% and a stun.
Stage One layers a tether, a soak and an interrupt so each ability pulls the raid in a different direction.
Intermission: sweeping threads with a single gap while Spindles must die in 45 s; on Heroic and Mythic their Knot roots players until dispelled.
Stage Three shrinks the grid (5×5 Heroic, 4×4 Mythic) and, on Mythic, rotates the hidden pattern 90° before it resolves.

Open the encounter page

MC Project (working title)

First-person Action MMORPG · Systems & Level Design

A first-person action MMORPG on a Minecraft server: Albion Online’s zone risk and player economy, World of Warcraft’s dungeons and bosses, and a combat system that resolves every hit against the target’s skeleton. Fifty-six linked design pages are the source of truth, and the build follows them.

In-game first-person HUD with the skill bar and target frame — In-game HUD, the zone map, a dungeon boss turnaround, and the art requirement board on the design site.

Zone map with safe, yellow, red and black territory — In-game HUD, the zone map, a dungeon boss turnaround, and the art requirement board on the design site.

Design & Planning

Zone and economy design after Albion Online: safe, yellow, red and black territory with full-loot risk, a player-run market, and gathering-to-crafting loops that keep every tier in demand.
Seven scripted dungeons plus a procedural rift mode assembled from 28 room templates, each with its own tier, group size and boss mechanics.
D1, the first five-player dungeon, is built on one sentence — walk 270° around the sunken yard, then drop into it from above. About 170 blocks of main path, four trap types and eight encounters, delivered as a 3D whitebox and a layered top-down plan.
Classes and growth run on 18 reusable skill atoms, so a new ability is a config entry rather than new code; 113 monster entries and 706 item entries share the same spec tables.

Development

Combat runs in TeaEngine, our own Fabric 1.21.1 engine mod: the client measures and reports, the server owns every rule and computes each result in memory.
Hits resolve against the target’s skeleton — per-bone hit boxes with part multipliers and swing-segment multipliers feeding one damage formula.
Spring Boot, PostgreSQL and Redis behind the game server, with session-ownership tokens that stop item duplication across instances.
A web editor with embedded Blockbench and save-to-game hot reload, and a validate-then-apply config loader that abandons a whole reload on a single bad entry.

Open the project page

Witcher 3 in Minecraft

MMORPG Server

An innovative MMORPG built on Minecraft and inspired by The Witcher 3 — a long-term personal studio project that I lead end to end.

Public-test gameplay PV.

Design & Planning

Designed the class & skill systems for five classes — Warrior, Mage, Priest, Rogue, and Archer — each with 25+ active and passive skills.
Designed skill-synergy mechanics and distinct build archetypes (playstyles) for every class.
Designed boss-instance mechanics and potion / item functions, and arranged the story-driven player progression and the ordering of reward instances.
Designed and shipped a roguelike tower-climb mode and a life-skill system (fishing) — randomized routes, reward builds, and a growth / output loop — tied into hidden instances to extend the content lifecycle.

Development

As main Java programmer, built the MMORPG's core systems early on: combat damage resolution and the damage-formula system, inventory and item-type storage, and a potion / item crafting and recipe system.
Engineered asynchronous scene & instance loading, and the open-world and instance party (group) system.
Implemented class skill-book progression with skill-point requirements, and the logic coordinating passive-skill triggers with active-skill cast conditions.
Designed and implemented the late-game large-raid & boss combat system — phase mechanics, skill triggers, target selection, and damage resolution — with refined combat feedback and multiplayer co-op.

Development process Project PDF

TurretCoop

Co-op Tower Defense · Roguelike

A co-op tower-defense game with roguelike elements, currently in development. Battles play out on a field that gradually widens — and what it widens into is never the same twice. (TurretCoop is a working title.)

TurretCoop — tower defending against a wave of enemies — In-development prototype — combat, modular tower parts, the roguelike upgrade screen, and building placement on the expanding battlefield.

TurretCoop — modular tower part selection: base, body, top — In-development prototype — combat, modular tower parts, the roguelike upgrade screen, and building placement on the expanding battlefield.

Design & Planning

Expanding battlefield — instead of a fixed map, the combat field widens as a run progresses.
Each new section is drawn from different module types, reshuffling layout and pacing for roguelike variety.
Modular towers — defenses are split into base, body, and top attack module, so players freely assemble their own towers.

Development

Wave Function Collapse (WFC) drives procedural terrain generation.
Part-based tower system — base / body / top modules combine into player-built towers.

Development process In development

Demons & Knights

Turn-based Strategy

A two-player confrontation game where players use cards and grid-based movement to outplay each other turn by turn.

Demons & Knights — annotated board showing knights, demons, the demon castle, barriers, traps, lava, bridges, and item chests — Board elements — knights, the demon castle, barriers, traps, lava, bridges, and item chests.

Design & Planning

Grid, unit, and card design.
Turn-based combat flow and balancing.

Development

Unity implementation of the board, units, and card logic.

Project PDF itch.io

Flux

2D Platformer

A 2D side-scrolling mobile game where the player travels to any past moment and reshapes space to progress through each level.

Design & Planning

Time-travel / space-transform mechanic design.
Level design for the mobile side-scroller.

Development

Unity implementation of movement and the time/space mechanic.

Project PDF itch.io

Scrollscape

Exploration

An open-ended, galaxy-style exploration project built in Unity, shipped as a playable vertical slice.

Gameplay video.

Design & Planning

Systems design for exploration and gameplay modules.

Development

Unity development across gameplay modules.
Rapid iteration on a 16-scene vertical slice.

itch.io Case study in progress

VR Ball Localization & Grasping Accuracy Experiment

Research — Proprioception & Sensorimotor Integration

Designed and developed under Professor Wallace Lages — a VR-based ball-localization and grasping experimental paradigm that quantifies the localization precision and error bounds of proprioception and sensorimotor integration.

VR experiment — arcane calibration step, marking spatial bounds with the staff — VR training prototype — arcane calibration, the rune-core lock task, and the end-of-session performance report.

VR experiment — rune-core localization task, locking a core's coordinates — VR training prototype — arcane calibration, the rune-core lock task, and the end-of-session performance report.

Design & Planning

Defined the experimental paradigm — how each trial localizes and grasps a target ball under controlled conditions.
Independent variables: target-ball position (x / y / z), distance, viewing angle (yaw / pitch), and feedback on/off.
Dependent measures: hit deviation, angular error, reaction time, and success rate.

Development

Built the full interaction flow in Unity, with trial randomization across conditions.
Implemented per-trial data logging and export to feed downstream statistical analysis.
Delivered a stable platform supporting repeated runs and fast experiment iteration.

Write-up in progress

Contact

If you'd like to talk about projects, collaboration, or anything around programming and design — reach out.