Team

Amber Griffith: 2D Artist, Graphics Designer, Game Designer

Pronoun: They/them

Amber Marie Griffith is an artist, designer, and developer from Pittsburgh, PA. A creator from a young age, Amber considers themself to be a jack of all trades, with years of experience in diverse fields such as illustration, animation, design, programming, and writing. Currently, they are a studying for a Master’s of Entertainment Technology (Class of 2023) at Carnegie Mellon University. As an undergraduate, they studied Computer Science with a minor in Game Design, also at Carnegie Mellon. Amber looks forward to building up their portfolio with more creative work and one day build a career where they can apply all the various skills they’ve gathered along the way.

Chao Li: Game Designer, Programmer

Chao Li is a game designer who worked in ByteDance before and is a graduate student from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. He has experience working on a high-quality mobile game in the industry and several student projects as both a game designer and programmer.

Jeffrey (Chia-Wei) Liu: Lead Game Designer, Programmer

Bio: Jeffrey (Chia-Wei) is a game designer and developer from Taiwan with a passion for economic systems, puzzles, and player interactions. He designs in an experience-oriented way and conveys ideas through the player experience. With bachelor’s degrees in Digital Media Art and Software Engineering received at Tsinghua University, Beijing, Jeffrey previously worked full-time in Heluo Studio, focusing on Chinese fantasy turn-based strategy games. He is currently a master’s student in Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. He has recently made several XR games and board games, and he is currently interested in level and puzzle designs.

Shan Jiang: Lead Producer, Website

Bio: Shan Jiang is a creative, multi-disciplinary, and multi-lingual producer and programmer passionate about the entertainment industry. After completing internships at Unity Technologies and Psychic VR Lab (Japan), she is a current Master of Entertainment Technology student at Carnegie Mellon University. Since her undergrad at Mount Holyoke College (the first women’s college in the U.S.), Shan has been studying Computer Science and created a special major in Interactive Media to pursue her passion in entertainment. A diverse range of projects (over 30 week-long to semester-long projects) have come to life while working independently or in teams of 2 to 30 people over the past few years, including casual mobile games, iOS, Android, and HoloLens (AR) apps, VR documentaries and Oculus VR games, animations, interactive films, and location-based installations, etc. As a member of IGDA and attendee at GDC and game gems, Shan keeps leveling up her skills outside school and remains an active member of the community.

Shicai He: Lead Programmer

Bio: Shicai He is a 3D generalist, programmer, and designer with an interdisciplinary background in architecture, CG art, and computer science. After 5 years of majoring in Architecture and 3 years’ architecture practice he found out what really excited him was to build virtual worlds where imagination was the only limitation and to fabricate stories and emotions into the worlds.

Xiaoying(Alexa) Wang: UX/UI, Assistant Producer

While receiving cross-disciplinary education in interaction design, Xiaoying Wang devoted herself to a wide range of challenging roles, UX designer, UI designer, game designer, programmer, project manager, and much more. Having been to Korea, Canada, and the United States for master’s program and hands-on workshops, Xiaoying makes “cross-cultural capacity” her trademark. Working with global talents that seek to use design and technology to change the world for the better, Xiaoying looks forward to exploring the fields of entertainment, experience design, engineering, and human-computer interaction, and hopes to develop a career that continues to grant her new knowledge, challenge her thinking pattern, and enriches her life.

Ralph Vituccio

Bio: Ralph Thomas Vituccio is a filmmaker and Professor of Media at Carnegie Mellon University.  His documentary, “IN SERVICE: Iraq to Pittsburgh”, explored a different facet of the Iraq War as seen through the eyes of local soldiers.  The film, “Ship Breakers”,  explored the devastating impact ship recycling has had on the environmental and the health of the workers in Gujarat, India. His most recent film, Haenyeo, documents the women free divers of Marado, South Korea. Ralph has also produced and/or created several interactive VR and interactive documentary programs.  His recent work in Virtual Reality and interactive documentary have won a 2018 Google-Tribeca grant as well as showing in numerous film festivals.  He has spoken at numerous conferences including SXSW, SIGGRAPH, GDC, i-Docs, Games For Change, etc. 

Michael Christel

Bio: Michael Christel is a Teaching Professor in the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). At the ETC, he is particularly interested in transformational games, i.e., those that change the player in a positive way. Conferences and workshops devoted to games for education and for health are appealing to me. Michael is a fan of other work at the ETC researching transmedia experiences, as evidenced by some ETC projects conducted jointly with ETC’s Philosophy Department. He has brought Informedia digital video library (IDVL) work to the ETC, leading to the development of tools for The HistoryMakers and others. Currently he is very interested in the use of entertainment technologies, text analytics, and digital video processing to empower digital humanities scholarship through resources like the 150,000 African American stories in The HistoryMakers Digital Archive.