Max Myers

Seethe and Scab

An exploration of the way that nucleur waste, and damage lingers like scars on our planet, Seethe and Scab is my first foray into horror, and uncomfort in game experiences. The game is based on the decommisioned Rocky Flats nuclear weapons manifacturing plant, and what the resulting clean up required.

My goals in the design of Seethe and Scab where to create fear, claustrophobia and a sense of not being alone without relying on jumpscares or any monster. I intended for the space itself to be the "monster", in as much as a wound closing around you is monsterous.

Work:
  -Building custom shaders to recreate the visual feedback caused by exposure to radiation in cameras
  -Creating a workflow that allowed me to quickly iterate over the "narrative" flow of the experiences
  -Development of mechanics that aimed to ground the player in space/materiality
  -Sound/Audio recording and editing

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Max Myers

[soon only the ocean]

[Soon Only The Ocean] is one of my most personal games, and was developed between the end of 2019 and into early 2020 and is a direct reaction to the bushfires, COVID pandemic and the death of my Grandmother. The game is no longer playable as it was designed to literally die, the island sinking over a month in real time as players recorded the environmental changes day to day.

At the start of the project I was interested in exploring the way climate change will, no matter what we do now, destroy certain parts of the world and the way caring for these places was reflected in how we care for loved ones dieing. Knowing that there is nothing we can do to save them, but caring and putting in work none the less because we love them. As lockdowns began the game also became a way for me to indulge in spaces that seemed so far away, to remember and recreate them as an act of indulgence.

Work:
  -Building custom tools for time of day/season control
  -Repurposing/Extending tools from earlier projects (Trees)
  -Custom shaders to create the soft/natural look of the game
  -Light networking setup to querie the time to ensure time cannot be "rewound"

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Max Myers

Paint Game

One of my favourite games I have ever made Paint Game is a playable and explorable colouring book. Intended as a playful and silly game about making a mess, Paint Game gives the player the ability to at any point turn what they are looking at into a colouring book page, painting on everything from their specific perspective. Once they are done painting, they can move around and see how the perspective warps and messes up their painting and then try again - painting over parts they have already coloured and generally making an unholy mess!

The games painting brush is deliberately imprecise and messy, making it almost impossible to paint within the lines and instead encouraging players to not give a shit and behave like toddlers with brand new crayons and a colouring book.

My Freeplay Parallels talk about Paint Game

Featured on the Super Rare Mixtape Vol. 1

Work:
  -Custom C#/HLSL system to enable the painting mechanic
  -Google database connection to allow for map sharing
  -Custom builds/design for homeplay vs. event/public

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Max Myers

Detritus

Intended as a genuine shitpost, Detritus is a game that turns all the images on your computer into a gallery. Ghosts wander around and comment on your images, generally praising and rarely being rude.

The game stems from a realistion that nothing stopped me from searching through a players computer and importing any images I found, along with the thought that people are constantly generating and saving images for jokes or to share. These ephemeral images get forgotten, and left to rot like the detritus on the bottom of a lake. In dredging up these files, and placing them in a psuedo gallery I wanted to both remind people of things they had forgotten and to make people giggle at the absurdity of this gallery of garbage.

Featured on the Super Rare Mixtape Vol. 1

Work:
  -File/Folder manipulation
  -Importing and reading data from arbitary locations on a computer
  -Shit posting

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Max Myers

Me

Heyo I'm Max, a game developer, tech artist and university tutor in Naarm (Melbourne) on Wurundjeri land.

I have a deep and abiding love for weird, stylized and glitch aesthetics, and alt/art game design. Outside of games, I am a whitewater paddler and coach, and boulder and hike when I can.

Skills

-Unity3D Generalist (Mechanics, Editor Tools, in engine workflow)
-Game Design
-Programming (C#)
-Tech Art (HLSL, forward/deferred pipeline, all the weird bits)
-3D Modeling (Blender)
-Teaching (1 on 1, Small Group Coaching, Full Class)

Experience & Education

Current

2022 to Current - Freelancing (Programming & Technical Art)

Various contracts working as a general Unity programmer and technical artist.

2018 to Current - RMIT University Tutor

Taking a variety of 1st and 2nd year courses focused on 3D game development. Teaching basic programming in C# for Unity3D, the full game development pipeline, debugging and problemsolving as well as project mangament.

2010 to Current - Slalom Kayaking Coach

Organising and running training sessions, coaching, camps, races, and paddler development.

Past

2022 - Masters of Design (Thesis) - RMIT University

2016 - Bachelor of Arts Honours (Games Art and Design) - Murdoch University

Achievements

2019
   Freeplay Nominee (Experimental Game): Tree Game
   Freeplay Parallels - Every Game that isnt Paint Game

2020
   Freeplay Nominee (Experimental Game): Soon Only The Ocean
   Freeplay Honorable Mention: Paint Game

Max Myers

Realtime mesh slicing and 3D signed distance feild texturing for vegetable internals.

Max Myers

Realtime paint effect. Using procedural mesh placement and compute shaders.

Max Myers

An experiment in using vertex colour to refrence model subsets.
Detailed explanation here

Max Myers

Effect inspired by the deer god in Princess Monoke. Makes use of texture animation, and vertex displacement for position.

Max Myers

Mirrored distortion between the reflection, and the object.

Max Myers

A custom stylised lighting model. Supported various specular and shadow falloffs for different types of material.

Max Myers

Implimentation of billboarded cube faces to create "fluffy" bushes.

Max Myers

A implimentation of Imposter based LOD in Unity.

Max Myers

2D verlet rope implimentation.

Max Myers

An experiment in compositing different rendering styles together to recreate tradtional cell animation style.