Los Angeles · USC Games

Haocheng Li (Daniel)

Game, graphics & software engineer.

I’m a recent Computer Science graduate of the Paul G. Allen School at the University of Washington, now beginning my M.S. in Computer Science (Game Development) at USC.

I make games because I love turning ideas into something real that other people can experience and feel. As a game and graphics engineer, I care about how a game feels and how it renders, from level design and camera work to simulation and real-time rendering.

I build games in Unity, Unreal Engine, and Godot. My broader engineering work spans API design with Java and Spring Boot, cloud infrastructure on AWS, large-scale data with Hadoop and Spark, distributed systems, and machine learning.

See my games ↓ Play Light as Wind ↗ LinkedIn ↗

Now: M.S. CS (Game Dev), USC
Before: B.S. CS, University of Washington
Engines: Unity · Unreal · Godot

Selected work

Games & graphics

04 projects

NEW · PART I OUT NOW

USC Games · That Game Jam · Team of 5

Light as Wind

A dreamy pixel-art side-scrolling adventure across the ocean, toward a faraway sky. Play as three plush heroes among sea creatures whose movement is fully procedurally animated.

Level design for Levels 04, 06, and 10
Designed interaction mechanics across levels, engineered gameplay logic and effects, and did QA and bug fixing
Built on a custom render pipeline for perspective pixel art and fully procedural animation with no skeletal rigs
Real-time physics and game feel: wind-blown paper, the swordfish’s swim, the crab’s vine swing
Shaders and destruction: a Worley-noise “air wall” and runtime mesh fracturing

Unity 6
C#
HLSL
Level design
Physics

Project details → Play on itch.io ↗ Official site ↗

UW CSE senior capstone

Legion’s Expedition

An auto-chess-inspired survivor game where a commander builds, merges, and leads a squad of autonomous champions against escalating enemy waves.

Godot
GDScript
Analytics APIs

Project details → Play ↗

UW CSE 457 computer graphics

Cloth Simulation

A real-time mass–spring cloth solver with stable integration, stretch constraints, configurable pinning, collision response, and interactive wind.

Unity
C#
Real-time physics

Project details →

6-person software team

Virtual Pet

A desktop companion that turns the Pomodoro technique into a persistent, gamified relationship with a virtual pet, with MVC architecture and automatic local state persistence.

TypeScript
React
Electron
NeDB

GitHub repository ↗

Beyond the game loop

Systems & technical work

Backend + ML

Personalized Content Platform

Built a Spring Boot recommendation service using k-means clustering on AWS EC2, API Gateway, and RDS, with OAuth 2.0 and JWT-based authentication.

80% less deployment effort

Java · Spring Boot · AWS · Docker · CI/CD

Data systems

Customer Data Warehouse

Designed and implemented a warehouse pipeline with Hadoop, Spark, and JDBC for large-scale customer data storage and analytics.

Distributed storage + analytics

Hadoop · Spark · JDBC · SQL

Applied AI

Machine Learning Workshops

Created and delivered hands-on workshops on image style transfer and speech-to-text, including source examples and pretrained models.

From model to learning kit

Python · Computer vision · Speech

2023 — now

Experience

2025

NextTier · Sacramento, CA

Software Engineer Intern

Recommendation systems, authentication, cloud infrastructure, observability, and data platforms.

2024

Botsmart · Beijing, China

Artificial Intelligence Intern

Practical ML education spanning image style transfer and speech recognition.

2023

Siemens Energy · Beijing, China

Information Technology Intern

Programmed and organized a Python-driven robotics competition for more than 30 colleagues.

LANGUAGES

Java, Python, C/C++, C#, TypeScript, GDScript, HLSL/GLSL

GAME + GRAPHICS

Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, real-time rendering, computer graphics

APPLICATIONS

Spring Boot, React, Electron, MVC

PLATFORM

AWS, Docker, GitHub Actions, CI/CD

DATA

SQL, RDS, NeDB, Hadoop, Spark