Michael Carychao / Product Designer & Artist-Engineer
I design and build creative tools, playful systems, and worlds people can enter.
Berkeley, California
Tools for creators.
Worlds for players.
Stories in motion.
01 / Creative tools & pipelines
Independent product
Midjourney animation, music, and story worlds in an interactive web experience.
Discovery, episode navigation, playback, and music behavior—designed and built together.
Creator, designer, developer
Explore the work on DreamLounge
Open source
Invented a turn-taking model for human-AI writing: author and model alternate one paragraph at a time, so the writer stays in the lead.
An open-source, cross-platform tool that alternates your prose with generated passages.
Creator, designer, developer
Explore the work on MaltStudio collaboration
Playable questions, developed with Will Wright’s team.
Generative-AI game prototyping with Netflix, plus playable Proxi UX prototypes.
UX Prototype Designer & Unity Developer
With Gallium Studios
Explore the work on Gallium Studios02 / Games & physical play
Current collaboration
Shared play across phones, without an internet connection.
Minigames revised with player feedback through TestFlight.
Game design and development collaborator
With Nash Weber
Explore the work on Two SeaterShipped product
A connected sword and companion fantasy game.
Kickstarter-funded. A run of 100 swords, co-created and produced with Tony Maligno.
Co-creator; electronics, iOS, digital fabrication
With Tony Maligno
Explore the work on Smart Swords
Released on Steam Early Access
A science-fiction world you enter through embodied VR play.
A VR puzzle game released on Steam Early Access, co-created with Jacob Dominicus.
Co-creator; game design and development
With Jacob Dominicus · Sharon Chang
Explore the work on Kitty Nigiri03 / AI Animation
Hundreds of experiments.
Since 2022.
Finished pieces, production experiments, and collaborations made as successive generations of image and animation tools became available.
I created the nature-world animation for Alternate Worlds, a Karen X. Cheng collaboration with over one million combined views on her Instagram and TikTok.
I’ve also collaborated with The Handpan Man and am a member of the Runway Creative Partners Program.
About the animation practice →Nine ways into the archive. Choose a genre and follow a thread.
04 / Studio collaborations
VFX
VFX work on Marvel’s Secret Invasion with Method and Shepherd Studios, plus earlier rendering work at Tippett Studio. Shaped through directors’ dailies: show an iteration, respond to direction, refine the next version.
VFX collaborations →Independent studio / Selected clients
My studio does product design, app development, and strategy for clients, alongside original work. I built its local AI pipeline with ComfyUI, local language models, and GPUs. I can build that kind of creative infrastructure for other artists and teams, too.
Inside the studio →About / purpose
I’m a product designer who prototypes in code, with a decade of designing and shipping creative tools, games, and AI experiences for web, mobile, and VR, including nearly four years with Will Wright’s team and a generative-AI project with Netflix.
I want to help make ambitious creative work possible through useful interactions, working prototypes, and carefully refined products.
I have a B.S. in Computer Engineering from San Francisco State University, plus college study in film and comics at Hampshire College and physics coursework at the University of Chicago.
I’m interested in hands-on product design and creative technology roles where I can build, test, and refine new ways to create.