Hi! I’m Yuan-Hao Chiang, co-founder, programmer, designer, and producer of video-games at Yuan Works. I have also done pixel art as a contract work, but I’m now mainly focusing on the former activities. I also did some websites back then, and I am in charge of most of the website design, management, and programming of our websites, and recently into vector graphics for prints and the websites. I single-handedly programmed about 90% of Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles (W&W for short), which translates to more than 100’000 (yes, one hundred thousand) lines of code, or let’s say, a 2000-page book that has to make a lot of sense in about one year! I have played video-games almost my entire life, and started making games when I was twelve using Visual Basic. Oh, I’m 23 years old

My career

I started out learning Visual Basic back in 1996 when I was a little kid and made my first small video-game called DiGiPet. By that time I hardly knew what a variable was, but I was able to handle both programming and sprite art anyway. After this small project, my brother Yuan-Hsi started helping me out with sprite art since programming was very time-consuming, and we finally started developing our expertise in our different jobs.

In 2003, I began my Computer Engineering career at the Costa Rica Institute of Technology. In the year 2007, I was recognized by Procter & Gamble as one of the Best 20 University Students in Costa Rica (in Spanish). The same year, a project I worked on, ATLAS, an collaborative system with multiple consistency levels, was accepted to the CLEI (Latin-American Electronics and Informatics Conference, the biggest Computer-related conference in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries) 2007 as an exhibitor. On February 2008, I graduated with a Bachelor degree.

I am fluent in Spanish, English, Chinese, and can communicate in Japanese. I was chosen for the Outstanding Student of the Japanese-Learning Language Tour in the year 2007 and was invited by the Japan Foundation to a two-week trip to Japan on September 2007, along with students of the Japanese language from more than 60 countries.

In the year 2008, ATLAS was selected as an Innovative Project on the Technology Insight conference held by PROCOMER (Foreign Trade Promoter Entity) and CAMTIC (Communication and Technology Information Representatives) for an exposition here in Costa Rica.

Hobbies

I have been playing video-games since I remember, and I prefer old-school hardcore games over new, casual ones. I started compiling a list of the video-games I had beaten but it was hard to keep track. I’m good at most genres, fighting, RTS (read: Starcraft), etc, but my specialty are Puzzle games, such as Tetris, Panel de Pon (Tetris Attack), Puyo-puyo, and Puzzle Fighter. If you play W&W then you’ll know that a Time Chain 98 112 123 176 means that I’m pretty good at puzzle games !

I also enjoy mostly Asian art such as manga and animé styles, as well as Asian games including many famous and less-known RPG’s. Hayao Miyasaki is my favorite director, and my favorite movie is 風の谷のナウシカ (Kaze no Tani no Nausica — Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind).

I also play the piano, though lately I’ve been out of time to do it. The last song I studied was Debussy’s Clair De Lune, one of my favorites; and I’m half way into Mozart’s Sonata No. 11 (famous for the last movement: Rondo Alla Turca, I’d love to learn this variation though).

Recently, thanks to a friend’s recommendation, I started doing barbell weightlifting as a healthy sport 3 times a week and swimming 2 times a week. I haven’t done 1 rep max attempts, but my current stats are 225 265 295 305 pounds for 5 reps for the Deadlift, and 190 220 245 pounds for 5 reps for the Squat. There’s still a long way ahead but I’m trying my best!