Prospector

Prospector is a first-person exploration game about unravelling a mystery buried deep beneath an alien desert. You play as a planet-hopping scavenger whose ship has broken down on a world of sand and ancient ruins. What starts as a salvage mission turns strange when a relic inside one of the ruins bonds with you, granting control of a cluster of floating geometric fragments that become the key to exploring deeper into the site.

The project was developed over six weeks by a three-person team, with each member taking ownership of separate sections of the game world. Everything pictured here represents my personal contribution: the level design, the sand shader system, the core movement and ability mechanics, and the out-of-bounds solution.

The sand shader was a technical centrepiece. I combined macro and micro bump maps with a custom noise texture to drive a subsurface shimmer effect: the bump frequencies shift when scaled, creating natural variation across the terrain at different viewing distances. The sand texture itself came from real life: sourced from a bag of building sand at a garden show, photographed and tiled into the material. The result behaves differently up close than at distance, which supported the central design challenge of the project.

That challenge was creating a sense of vast scale while keeping the actual levels efficient and performant. My solution: fog planes positioned to suggest enormous distances, and props half-buried in the dunes so only their upper portions are visible. What reads as a monolithic spire from across the level is, up close, a small prop disappearing into the terrain. For players who wandered off the main path, I built a sand-storm sequence that would envelope them, reposition them to an ambiguous point near the play space, and disorient them just enough that the transition didn't feel like being caught by an invisible wall. The player simply found themselves slightly unsure of where they were and carried on.