Characters.
Worlds. Experiences.
Xi YOU (Merriphel)
Game Designer & Concept Artist
I study Concept Art at Teesside University and work across game design, visual storytelling, and worldbuilding. My practice connects characters, environments, and gameplay, from early concepts to playable prototypes.
My experience includes game design at TRISCRIPT Game Studio, leading the academic project The Gearspire, and collaborative art production for Global Game Jam, CIGA Game Jam, and Dog Of War.
VIEW FULL CV ↗ merriphel@outlook.com ↗BA (Hons) Concept Art
Teesside University · Expected graduation 2027
Game Design Intern
TRISCRIPT Game Studio · Research, mechanics & a playable browser demo
Team leadership & game jams
The Gearspire · Global Game Jam · CIGA Game Jam · Dog Of War
Research interests
My long-term research centres on the relationship between game worlds, artificial intelligence, and multimodal interaction. I want to design virtual worlds where persistent AI characters can inhabit the environment as embodied participants—with coherent identities, accumulated histories, distinct perspectives, and the ability to act. Rather than functioning as scripted sources of dialogue, these characters would remember shared experiences and develop relationships with players through what happens in the world.
I am particularly interested in how memory and identity remain continuous over time; how player behaviour shapes trust, intimacy, and conflict; and how a character’s autonomy can be bounded without reducing it to a fixed script. These relationships should influence more than dialogue. They might change what a character notices, what information they share, how they respond to the environment, and which actions become possible. I also want to study how open-ended interaction can coexist with authored narrative structure and coherent worldbuilding.
My previous games explore how choices, movement, visual information, and world rules can allow players to discover meaning through play. I am now extending that approach to persistent characters and multimodal interaction through voice, gaze, gesture, spatial proximity, VR, and haptic feedback. CoraxNest is my first infrastructure prototype toward this direction: it investigates the continuity, provenance-aware memory, temporal awareness, and bounded autonomy that a persistent AI character would need across sessions. My next step is to connect this foundation to playable environments, so that memory, relationships, and character agency can become part of the game’s narrative and mechanics.