Bits & Bytes
Bits & Bytes is a narrative-driven adventure game that blends 2D and 3D elements to explore digital memory.
Players enter the digital world as a Bounty Hunter and delve deeper into it with Uphoriax, an extension of yourself in the digital realm that provides new perspectives of viewing. Players will shift between reality and a hidden world of data and retrieve forgotten artifacts, ranging from old video games to obscure personal files, each imbued with emotional significance that offers a window into the past.
Bits & Bytes explores how digital remnants — audio, glitches, fragmented data — can hold emotional weight as deeply as physical keepsakes. It’s a story of loss and reconnection told through the fragile, flickering traces we salvage from forgotten code.
Watch In-Game Playthrough (Intro) ->
Tools
Unity, Figma, Maya, Adobe Creative Suite
Time
Sep 2024 – Present
Role
Game Director | Narrative Designer | Game Artist
Team Size
10-Person Dev Team
As a thesis project, Bits & Bytes served not only as a platform to design a compelling interactive experience, but also as an opportunity to lead as Game Director, coordinating a multidisciplinary team from pre-production through post-production. Beyond delivering a polished and playable game, the project emphasized experimentation, using the medium to explore how interactivity, digital remnants, and narrative agency can create deeply personal, emotionally resonant experiences. This creative process was further supported by a 40+ page written thesis paper, reflecting on the philosophy of games and the personal, evolving journey of crafting interactive storytelling.
Read More -> Bits & Bytes: A Digital Cartography of Ghosts Tha are called Memory
Key Contributions
Led a 10-person multidisciplinary team through the full production pipeline, coordinating collaboration across art, design, programming, and narrative to deliver a polished, 20-minute vertical slice gameplay experience.
Collaborated with USC’s Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center as part of the Immersive Legacy Memorials Project, supporting workshops that help gynecologic cancer patients co-create legacy pieces in virtual reality alongside USC Keck School of Medicine and Cinematic Arts students.
Read More -> Immersive Legacy Memorials
Directed the game’s overall design compass, from player experience to core mechanics, by grounding development in a research-driven design philosophy. Drawing from themes of memory, loss, and digital ephemera, I framed the act of retrieving lost digital artifacts as a meditative, interpretive journey.
Players navigate a dual existence, between a tangible 3D reality and a symbolic 2D digital realm embodied through their counterpart, Uphoriax. This traversal mirrors the continuum between reality and virtuality, allowing players to reconstruct fragmented stories while contemplating what it means to be remembered in a data-driven world.
Developed and implemented layered narrative mechanics rooted in agency and interpretation, where storytelling emerges through interaction, not exposition. I led the design of Memograph, an in-game application that transforms physical objects into spatialized, explorable memories. Through multi-layered architectures representing emotion and logic, players restore corrupted data by piecing together scattered fragments—turning memory into a terrain.
In tandem with system design, I also wrote and revised the narrative content embedded in these memory spaces, ensuring that each restored fragment carried emotional depth and reinforced the thematic arc of loss, recollection, and meaning-making.
Led the aesthetic direction and UI/UX design across both 2D and 3D environments, crafting nostalgic, retro-inspired interfaces and spatial layouts that echo the emotional texture of memory.
While both realms share a cohesive retro sensibility, each was designed with distinct characteristics: the 3D space evokes the tactile familiarity of an old desktop environment with a sprinkles of fantasies, while the 2D digital realm embodies abstraction and symbolic interpretation, allowing players to perceive memory and data from a more metaphorical perspective.
Yvette Fu | 傅鱼泓 