About Me
Hi, I’m Liu Hang. You can also call me 长弓手地鼠—“Longbow Gopher.”
I’m a quest designer / narrative designer, depending on where you think “narrative” fits into game design, and what work that actually involves.
I graduated in Visual Communication Design from Jiangxi Institute of Technology (not a great school, haha). I’m based in Shanghai and have five years of experience in the industry.
I’m currently a quest designer on Petit Planet at miHoYo; before that, I worked on Zenless Zone Zero. Those Asaba Harumasa and Trigger character stories that made so many people cry? Those were my work. I’ve also worked on quest design and quest-tool development for Need for Speed Mobile, ANANTA, Project Breach, and Farlight 84. I have experience with both Unity and Unreal, though personally I probably prefer Unreal Engine for being a little friendlier to designers.
I used to be a film critic, and in college I wanted to go on to study directing. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that film probably wasn’t a great way for me to make a living at the time. Meanwhile, the wave of short-form video was pushing independent media away from depth and substance. I’d always enjoyed making maps for Counter-Strike 1.6, and I’d tinkered with the Warcraft III World Editor. So I tried applying to Shanda through graduate recruitment and became a game designer.
I used to think of games as films with interaction: get the storytelling right, and you’d get the narrative right.
But as I worked on more projects, I gradually realized that the heart of narrative is creating experiences, not simply “telling a story to your player.”
It’s experience design: carefully shaping what players learn, what they do, and what they feel over a stretch of time. To borrow Gabe’s words:
Games are things that respond to agency of players.
I want that idea to run through the work I do now and the work I do in the future. As I keep working toward “being a good narrative designer,” I hope I can put it into practice and actually become one.
You may also notice that I’ve changed jobs fairly often. I’m not going to dodge that.
What I can promise is that I’ve put everything I could into every project on my résumé. That also means I’ve often ended up disappointed by the gap between my hopes and the reality of a project, worn myself down over it, and eventually decided to try somewhere else.
What I’m looking for is a team I can believe in: somewhere I can take real responsibility and become a core contributor. I’m not particularly interested in “power” or telling other people what to do. I want a place where I can try out my design ideas, put them into practice, test whether they hold up, and make what I learn part of my own approach to design.
A good team doesn’t make you keep asking, “Whose side are you on?” It doesn’t make you constantly wonder, “Will doing this threaten their position in the company?” It lets you bring an idea to the table, discuss it, test it, try it, and make it happen.
That means I’ll talk to you, and I’ll try to make my thinking clear. I want to be a real collaborator, not someone who simply takes orders within a hierarchy. I want to help carry the difficult parts, get the people on both sides of the production pipeline involved, and keep creating those little eureka moments in design together.
Because, for me, making games is a process of creating designs and solving problems. Good design works with the situation you actually have. It keeps finding sparks, balancing people’s needs and hopes, and finding ways to express them in the work.
Good collaboration should be full of eureka moments. They happen every time you’re sitting at your desk or in a meeting, really thinking, “Hey, what if we tried this…?”
I hope to find a team that keeps creating those moments—and to become someone who can take ownership of a part of that team’s work.