Instant Ramen

Welcome to Instant Ramen

A Japan-related — culture, animé, video games, photos — site run by Hao. If any (or all!) of these topics interest you, then you will like it around! I’m also a participant and contributor of Japansoc.org, a community of Japan-related bloggers working together to promote the J-web. This is my night-time hobby.

Day-time Profile

I am Yuan-Hao Chiang (姜元皓), full-time worker for and co-owner of Yuan Works Co. Ltd., a small Independent Video Game Developer studio emphasizing Asian markets (Japan and Korea). Our latest product, Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles, available in English and Japanese, won the 3rd place in the Official GP2X contest in Korea, and was also nominated as an Independent Games Mobile finalist in the Game Developers Conference 2008 in San Francisco, sponsored by nVidia and other well-known companies from the industry.

Yuan Works has also worked for contractual work for Nintendo Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS projects on the past.

Personal Background

I’m a Computer Engineer graduated from the Costa Rica Institute of Technology in the year 2008, and elected by Procter & Gamble as one of the Top 20 Undergraduate Students on the national level. I also programmed and authored a research paper for the project ATLAS, a collaborative system with multiple consistency levels, accepted on the CLEI (Latin-American Electronics and Informatics Conference — the biggest Computer-related conference in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries) in the year 2007 as an exhibitor. ATLAS was also selected as an Innovative Project on the Technology Insight conference by the Communiation and Technology Information Representatives, with international visitors from all the American continent, India, etc.

My spoken languages are Chinese, Spanish, English, and Japanese. I was also chosen by the Ministry of Japan’s Japan Foundation as an Outstanding Student of the Japanese-Learning Language Tour, an invitation to the best Japanese-language learners, to study in Japan. I have worked as a Chinese/Spanish/English/Japanese interpreter, translator and assistant.

My programming background started with Visual Basic when I was 12 years old, and moved on to C, C++, PHP, Java, C#, MySQL, CSS, ASM, SQL Server, as well as many others. My emphasis is now C/C++ for embedded systems, with more than 130,000 Lines of Code on our previously mentioned video game. I have also worked professionally as a pixel/dot art sprite artist. I am also a vector graphics artist.

Hobbies and hardware

I’m an avid gamer as well as an anime and jdrama addict sometimes. We own more than 30 different gaming systems (including high-level Neo Geo MVS arcades and many Korean prototype consoles exclusive to Game Developers ^^). I’ve also played StarCraft for many years (if you’re up to the challenge go ahead!) and I’ve been following the Korean scene very closely. My configuration is a Dual-Screen machine for work and a more casual Acer Aspire One for travelling.

I also enjoy playing the piano casually, Debussy’s Clair de Lune is one of my latest performances. I’m also into languages and people, heavy weightlifting, swimming, drawing, Asian calligraphy (書法/書道), Tetris (let’s play on the NDS!), and much more stuff.

Contact / Follow Me

Feel free to reach me through the following mediums for anything:

• Email: hao [at] instant-ramen.net
• Instant-Ramen RSS Feed
• Facebook profile
• Follow me on Twitter (HaoDesu)
• StumbleUpon

Oh, and Ayane-chan on the first picture is not my daughter! :)