Role: Gameplay Programmer
Time Frame: January 2025 - Present
Engine: Unreal Engine
ChangelingVR is a Virtual Reality game project that I am currently working on in a large team as an intern. It is a dynamic mystery game set in a world of magical realism where you play as a private eye attempting to help a family solve their problems.
Changeling has been an exciting project to work on, giving me much experience on what goes into a VR project. My main work so far has been refactoring old objects and mechanics to be more optimized and fit the current implementations of the levels, as well as creating the core mechanics of future levels. I'm especially focused on what is currently the Father's level. I have been working very closely with the level designers to determine which direction we want to go in and what the story points for future levels will be. I am confident that we will have created something very special by the end of this project.
Play it on Itch:
Play Here
Role: Team Lead, Programmer, Level Designer
Time Frame: August 2024 - February 2025
Team Size: 4
Engine: Godot
In Neon Shadows, you are a Shadow Runner navigating the dangerous streets of Neon City. With fluid combat mechanics and open, expansive levels, you uncover a conspiracy that threatens the entire metropolis. Your choices shape the city’s future, and your actions determine your fate. Will you bring justice to Neon City, or will you become another shadow in the neon lights?
Neon Shadows is an academic project that I led in a production studio environment over the course of a semester at RIT. As project lead and producer, my responsibilities included: determining the scope and design of the project, assigning tasks, scheduling meetings, and helping keep the team on track. On top of this, I did much of the level and sound design for the game. Some final touch-ups to the game were done in January and Early February before it was published to Itch. Overall, this was a very successful project that everyone on the team was proud of.
Play it on Itch:
Play Here
Role: Programmer
Time Frame: January 2024 - May 2024
Team Size: 8
Engine: Godot
Two to four party phoenixes battle head-to-head to light up the sky on the festival of flames, shooting elaborate pyrotechnic patterns in a twin-sticks shooter meets bullet hell game! Who will be the ruler of revelry?
Fire Flight is an academic project made in a production studio environment over the course of a semester at RIT. This is unique among the projects I've worked on as it is a local multiplayer game, meaning it was designed for multiple players to play at the same time. I worked mainly as a gameplay developer, developing active gameplay elements like trails, power-ups, clouds, and player controls. We managed to make a ton of progress on Fire Flight and made a very polished product in the end.
Play it on Itch:
Play Here
Role: Programmer
Time Frame: February 2022 - April 2022
Team Size: 4
Engine: MonoGame
Slithering around in the forest, you've discovered an old temple deep within the trees. Within its walls was a small crossbow. As a snake does, you decided to pick it up. Suddenly, you felt the floor begin to tremble! The walls behind you began to rise as a horde of monsters flooded in to defend the temple. Luckily, the crossbow came with an arrow! Only one, though. And can you even use it without any arms? You can probably make it work.
Crossboa was a fun project that I completed with a team during my freshman year of college. As such, it was a big learning experience. MonoGame has very little engine support so the bulk of this game had to be figured out by how well we could organize an object-oriented project on top of all the game mechanics. Most of my role revolved around collision detection and level progression. I handled file reading and generated levels, as well as handled level progression/transitions and enemy spawning. This was a very successful mini-project that propelled us to make more complex games in the future.
Play it on Itch:
Play Here
Role: Solo Developer
Time Frame: 4 weeks, Fall 2022
Engine: Unity
Spaceway Skirmish sees you fighting on the front lines of a stellar conflict. Seeking only glory, you venture out to make scrap metal of all ships that would dare oppose you. Whether it be enemy ships or the Kuiper belt, you won't stop fighting until someone takes you down for good.
Spaceway Skirmish is among the first games I ever made. It is a very simplistic game, as this was my first time using Unity. My main goal was to make something that worked and was fun to play. I think I succeeded in both of these goals. In addition, I used free assets to make the game look as visually appealing as possible. I think I did really well in that regard, and the final product speaks for itself.
Play it on Itch:
Play Here
Role: Solo Developer
Time Frame: December 2024 - Present
Engine: Unity
Here is an in-progress look at the terrain generator that I'm currently working on. This is a fun experiment about a topic I'm interested in that I wanted to take more in-depth. Currently, it is set up using Perlin Noise to mimic a suitably convincing terrain. A lot of work has also been done with shaders as they're something I wish to gain more proficiency with. The shaders are the second focus of this project.
As of February 8, 2025, there are still a few areas of focus left I want to work on. My goal is to finalize the terrain generation algorithm by adding hydraulic erosion to make the terrain look much more realistic. I also want to look into how to use compute shaders, which calculating erosion appears to be a good match for. Finally, I need to create a user interface so that parameters can be tested and manipulated in play mode. As is, most of this project is designed to be able to run completely in editor mode, so a swap to being able to manipulate it in play mode is important before I publish it on Itch.
Clone on Github:
Check it out
Role: Solo Developer
Time Frame: May 2024 - July 2024
Engine: Unity
Here, I endeavored to make a physics simulation of the solar system. I wanted it to be both fast (being able to run several years per second) and extremely accurate. I did this by directly using physics equations and using integration algorithms to ensure a high degree of accuracy. All data about planets were obtained from observational datasets from NASA.
This project took me on a journey and taught me several things about physics simulations and how to make them efficient. I also fell into several other research topics throughout this project, some of which: camera controls, shaders, and splines, all made it into the final product. My implementation of splines and their use in the project is something I'm especially proud of. It makes going towards the planets feel really fun and dynamic, which brings a bit of life to something that is just meant to be an observational simulation.
Play it on Itch:
Play Here
Role: Solo Developer
Time Frame: March 2023 - June 2023
Engine: Canvas (HTML API)
This started as a short academic project, which I then ran away with and turned into a long and complex personal project. As an audio visualizer, the goal here is to take in audio and visualize the waveforms on the screen. My idea was to oscillate a 3D sphere in a 2D viewport.
A great deal of this project was just problem-solving. A lot of math was required to figure out how to draw a sphere as a series of lines. Essentially, I had to program an entire 3rd dimension. I had a lot of fun configuring extra options for the program, and in the end, it is much more customizable than it perhaps needed to be. One interesting thing I did in this project was that I dipped into server programming, and figured out a way to send music the user uploads to a server to save it for the future.
Play it Online:
Play Here
Role: Solo Developer
Time Frame: July 2023 - November 2023
Game: Rain World
Engine: Unity
This is the most difficult and successful project I've ever worked on. Pupify is a mod that converts the player character to a slugpup, another creature within the game. Given the complexity of the code in this game, this took a lot of learning and experimenting to figure out how to accomplish.
This is my first project that a large group of people have played. At the time, people hadn't completely dissected how the part of the codebase worked yet, so I was partially breaking new frontiers. This, of course, made the project very challenging as I had little experience in modding as is. In the time since, some other modders have used my code to figure out how some code related to slugpups works or have asked me questions about it, which feels strange as a student still in college. Overall, I'm very happy with how this project turned out.
Play it on Steam:
Play Here
Role: Solo Developer
Time Frame: March 2023
Game: Portal 2
This was a short project where I made three consecutive maps in Portal 2 as part of a level design course. The goal of the project is to teach players a mechanic. The first level is intended to teach that mechanic, the second to expand on it, and the final to add a twist on that mechanic. The mechanics I used for this project were not normal, and more derivative of underlying mechanics in the game, however, it was very effective and challenging for players. As far as Portal 2 levels go, these definitely lean more towards puzzle than they do adventure, and pretty difficult ones at that, which was my goal. Playtesters enjoyed the challenge of it, so I feel I got the intended effect.
Hello! My name is Donovan Scullion. I am a 4th year Game Design and Development Major at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
I like to spend my time making, designing, and developing games. I love making interactive programs in C++ & C# that engage the user and hopefully leave a lasting impact on players. While this is of course predominantly in the realm of game development, I also enjoy simulation development and have a lot of interest in graphics programming. When I am not coding, I am either playing video games or reading a book.
