Sean Miller

Project Chimera (WIP)

Singleplayer 3D narrative-driven puzzle game about a woman who was born without psychic powers, in a world where everybody else has them.

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The Giving Well (2025)

Singleplayer 3D puzzle platformer about a traveler fulfilling the wishes of a village's locals.

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Bug Days of Summer (2024)

Singleplayer 3D role playing game and first person shooter about an exterminator come to take care of a serious infestation.

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Designed to Climb (2024)

Singleplayer 2D platformer/management game about a robot, inside a bigger robot, climbing out of an even bigger hole.

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Keep an Ear to the Ground (2021)

Singleplayer 3D exploration game about a blind mole trekking across a desert.

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A key part of the gameplay was the ability of the player to send out sound waves which allow them to briefly see the world around them. I accomplished this with a custom shader synced with a management script. With the script, I could keep track of the player, objects, and enemies in the scene. The player could create waves, and objects buried in the sand could reflect waves back at the player.Also important were the enemies, a snake and an owl. The two creatures had distinct behavior, but both were controlled with a finite state machine, could "hear" the player, and were able to deal damage and steal a trinket off the player upon a successful attack.

The most striking visual element of this game is the trails left behind as the player traverses the field. Each sprite paints its own trail, so when the player has a large herd, they're able to paint large swathes at once. This emphasizes the snowballing nature of the gameplay. I accomplished this by rendering each sprite's lateral position onto a mask texture. The mask was then used to decide where to draw the grass texture over the dirt, and also where to place grass particles.

The short length of this game combined with its status as a game jam submission presented some challenges to gameplay. I wanted to make the game different every playthrough to help with replayability, but I also wanted to be sure a player who wins on their first try would get to use all of the tools. My solution was a system that randomized the rounds of gameplay at startup, ensuring every tool would reveal the winning clue and every part model would be used. This system used a set of tweakable parameters to create a rising difficulty curve regardless of which round each clue appeared.The tools themselves also presented a design challenge, demanding unique mechanics for each one and audio or visual effects to relay those mechanics to the player. In particular, the thermal camera was the most complex and fun to work on, requiring me to learn some basic raymarching to represent the heatmap of each part.

The gameplay centers around giving the player a series of pressing tasks which all distract from each other. The motivation driving this is to keep the health of the large robot from reaching zero, either from alien attacks or the rising lava in the pit. For us, this meant balancing how quickly each meter would deplete, how quickly the player could get to each station, and how quickly the player could replenish each meter.I was primarily responsible for the exterior scene, which has the most visual feedback on the screen at any given moment. The attacking aliens, the turret firing, and the rising lava are all non-interactive elements, but their inclusion gives logical reasons for the meters' depletion and creates a greater sense of pressure on the player to keep up with their tasks.

My responsibilities for this project primarily involved the first person shooter segment of the game. In order to match the Quake-like aesthetic we were going for, I took the effort of using J.A.C.K., a Quake and Half-Life map editor to create the level. Textures were created with an old Quake WAD editor called Wally. I was then able to import the level into Blender to make any final touches, and export it into Godot. Using this workflow allowed me to sculpt and edit the level more comfortably than Blender alone would have, plus it was just fun to use tools authentic to the game whose look I was trying to mimic.

The gameplay largely revolves around unique interactions between the player's grappling hook and various puzzle elements laid out in the world. To accomplish this, I leveraged Godot's built-in physics system and assigned each type of element to a different physics layer. Behavior would be applied to all physics bodies on a particular layer, rather than assigning a script to each physics body. For the limited scope of this project, this allowed us to rapidly test different ideas with a great amount of flexibility, and even let us make unique set pieces with familiar behavior, such as a chopped tree in level 1, or a rotating gantry at the end of level 3. The limiting factor on the development of puzzle elements became what we felt we could reasonably introduce to the player within the expected playtime.I also devised a system of loading different configurations of maps at runtime. The village has different background set pieces that will appear depending on how many tree spirits the player has found up to that point, but the village also appears with different characters, cutscenes, and at different times of day independent of that. This system allowed the artist to only have to make the constituent parts of the different village scenes, and we used in-game logic to assemble them at runtime, rather than having to choose from a premade list of every possible permutation.

One of our goals with this game is to seamlessly combine physics puzzle mechanics with stealth gameplay. Even at this early stage of development, this goal has already presented some fun challenges. In particular, using Godot's physics engine to allow the player to pick up and manipulate objects in the world proved surprisingly tricky. I could get physics objects to follow player movements easily enough, but the simplest implementation resulted in unrealistic interactions between the held object and other physics objects in the scene. In the end, I settled on a system of simulated damped harmonic oscillators acting on the held object, which allows it to move convincingly with the player while still using applied forces within the physics engine to move it, allowing for realistic interactions across the board.On the graphics side of things, I recently wrote a shader that dithers dynamic lighting and shadows along the texel grid of the surface's diffuse texture. My implementation fades the effect at distance or at shallow angles to avoid distracting Moire patterns from emerging. I'm quite pleased with the effect, as I think it makes for a unique look and complements the aesthetic we're targeting nicely.