Games.
A game about the bittersweet feeling of making hotpot at home for yourself. Made with Unity. Now Available on Steam.
Double R. is a Walking Simulator that attempts to capture the awkwardness and social anxieties introverts often encounter in their lives. Made in Unity.
A short 3D level made in Unreal Engine 4 about meeting up with your friend in a natural history museum.
Vampire Simulation is an experimental VR game of a person transforming into a vampire and catching its prey. Made in Unreal Engine 4.
Use mouse to click options that controls your life, play with it, balance it, enjoy it, destroy it, give it up, rip it apart, and finally, deal with it.
Made in CiGA Game Jam 2020.
Nothing To See Here!
Nothing to See Here! is a creative storytelling card game where players make up stories to get themselves out of compromising situations.
Clean Your Shit Up is a 3D game made in Global Game Jam 2020 with the theme Repair. Inspired by people who love to keep their space clean.
A real-time plant-growing simulator where players are given a mysterious plant, and are asked to nurture it from a seed to a fully grown plant in a span of a week in real time.
Client Work.
Music Video for 江北嘴暮色
by Fantasy Girl 1985
Directed and produced a retro synthwave style music video for Fantasy Girl music 江北嘴暮色 as part of their debut EP 重庆迷雾. Process includes concept and visual design, story-boarding, designing and rendering 3D scenes, creating 3D animations, and video editing.
Cyberpunk Music Video for
1 2 3 4 by Uzumakid Li
Directed and produced a music video for Uzumakid Li's song 1 2 3 4. Process includes concept and visual design, story-boarding, designing and rendering 3D scenes, creating 3D animations, and video editing.
Music Videos for PO8's 2020 EP
血钻 The Tragic West
Directed and produced 3 music videos for this EP. Process includes concept and visual design, story-boarding, designing and rendering 3D scenes, creating 3D animations, and video editing.
Art Projects.
My Echo
Red Yellow Blue
2021, Simulation & Interactive Installation
My Echo is a 3D simulation of an echoing mountain made in a game engine. One initiates by shouting into their microphone; after a few seconds they would hear a playback of their voice with a reverb effect, similar to an echo--the natural phenomenon caused by the reflection of sound waves. Li attempts to summon a familiar image often associated with echos: being on top of the mountains, surrounded by a vast land of rocks and trees, feeling small and insignificant, one shouts into the void, hoping for a response from the unknown.
2018, Interactive Immersive Installation
This piece consists of three virtual scenes displayed in VR headsets placed in three separate spaces within the exhibition room. In each scene, the viewer is placed in specific locations--public bathroom, children's park, and hotel room, with a child. The seemingly childish and innocent but subtly eerie and sexual scenes confronts viewer to make an association usually perceived as shameful and prohibited--that of children with sexuality.
R.E.D.
2017, Interactive Immersive Installation
Collaboration with Nicole Wang, Runa Yu.
An attempt to examine the emerging culture of live-streaming and its potential entanglement with surveillance and the spectacle.
Hit & Run
2018, Interactive Installation
A two-player racing game in which players smash their paintings repeatedly to move their avatar and reach the finish line on the other side of the screen. By transforming viewers into players, this piece is an attempt to question the pre-existing notion of art and challenge the “proper” way of treating an artwork.
Experiments.
Real-Time Experiments
Alternative Controllers
Robot Revolt
-An Escape Room
Experiments with real-time graphics programming and tools rendered in game engines. Topics include procedural generation, shaders programming, AI, and render textures
Experiments with physical computing and alternative ways of interacting with the computer and the digital interface.
A Turing Test Escape the Room with roles for 4 players and an ending that requires the players to prove their humanity through empathy. A 7-person project for a class.
Me.
Rachel Li is an interdisciplinary game designer and new media artist from Shenzhen, China and currently based in Brooklyn, New York. With a background in studio art and game design, she constantly challenges the border between technology, art, and design. Fascinated by video games as an artistic medium to shape people’s understanding of their bodies and identities through rules, interactions, and navigation of virtual spaces, she creates autobiographical simulation games inspired by her observations and reflections on people and the world around her. Her recent work Hot Pot For One, a bittersweet game about making hot pot alone on Christmas Eve, has received critical acclaim, including a nomination for a BAFTA Student Award for Best Immersive. With the help of NYU Game Center Incubator program, Rachel co-founded an all-woman studio Eat Melon LLC in 2020 to develop a sex-positive card game that is now under contract for publishing with Clarkson Potter, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. Her art installations and experimental games have been featured in various art exhibitions and major game festivals in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chengdu, Shenzhen, and on the internet.