My name is Yazhi Fan. You can also call me Finn.
I'm a professional game developer as well as a passionate hobbyist.
This website is a space for sharing my hobbyist projects, things that are too long to fit on a resume, but still reflect my love for making games.
My favourite shooters are Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007) and Dead Space.
My favourite simulation and survival games are The Sims, Project Zomboid, Don't Starve, and Oxygen Not Included.
For hobby game dev, my #1 favourite engine is Godot.
I have a good amount of experience with Unreal and Unity, and lightweight engines like PuzzleScript and RPGMaker. I love trying out new things.
With over 6 years of professional work experience in C++, I'm comfortable working with in-house or custom-built engines.
I love participating in game jams during my free time, and I've joined over 20 so far.
You can find my itch.io pages here:
My favorite game jam event is Ludum Dare.
Some highlights from my entries include:
Ludum Dare 57 Compo – Net. Sweeper – No. 26 Overall
Ludum Dare 56 Jam – Bees Save Themselves – No. 9 Fun, No. 33 Overall
Ludum Dare 55 Jam – Meow Summoning – No. 59 Overall
I had two medium to large learning projects made with Unreal.
The first one was a multiplayer card game, which I eventually abandoned due to frustrations with Unreal 4's UI system. I still find the Unreal 5 UI system cluncky.
However, that project taught me a great deal about Unreal’s multiplayer networking model, including replication, RPCs, and session handling. I was able to host my half-working prototypes for lobby setup and synchronized game state over the Steam network with ease.
Among all the commercial engines I’ve tried, I find Unreal’s networking system to be the most developer friendly and well maintained. This made me fall in love with Unreal engine, and I wanted to do something more with the engine.
I collaborated with an artist for the second Unreal learning project, which was a third-person shooter with narrative dialogues and quests.
This project was a C++ and Blueprint hybrid. We made four mini vertical slice levels, and I had fun designing the sewer map for the shooter section.
I love making clean, easy to use tools that speed up development.
I also love doing things that no games have ever done before, especially things that are high impact for the entire gameplay experience.
I dislike spending too much time on details that I don't think any player is going to notice or is not going to affect gameplay (things one can only notice when in 5x slowmo). Although I acknowledge that deatails can add up, and I admire people who are dedicated in the details.
I studied Electrical Computer Engineering at school, and my first job was device engineer. I learned a lot of low level programming skills at school, as well as Compiler, Operating Systems, and Computer Architecture.
As a device engineer, I did a lot of work around Linux embeded devices, C++, and C.
C++ code sample (old but I think they are still very good, plus being written before the wide use of AI) .fanyazhi@email.com
+1(716)-255-1280