It took me a while but it is finally here: my brand new portfolio website & blog!
As you can see it is still under construction and things still might change a bit but at least I’ve got a place to post now.
I will update this blog with my thoughts on game & level design, I will share my findings and keep you guys updated on what I’m currently working on.

If there is one thing I have a lot of then it are concepts: I have notes & drawings everywhere, yet so little time to make them all. I am sharing these ideas with you guys so feel free to send me a message or place a comment about them!
Lines, debris & water, those are the key elements of 3 gameconcepts that are haunting my mind for a little while now and I will soon tell you more about it. That are only 3 ideas but I have much more but first things first and complete the current projects I’m working on.
Currently I am working on a little Pirate game, as well as a serious game for a big company in the food industry, but I’ll keep that secret for now.

Other then game design I am also constantly thinking about level design, I try to experiment with different approaches & designs all the time. If I would link these experiments then I would say that diversity & interaction are key to my maps, or experiments as I’d sometimes like to call them.

Well that’s enough for my first post, now you know what I am doing and what I will write about, so stay tuned because I can’t wait to share some proper concepts with you!

Fontys Gamejam 2011
Minion Fate was created during the Fontys Mechatronics Gamejam 2011.
This time I teamed up with 2 classmates to form a 3-man programming group, and we were quickly joined by 3 artists from de Eindhovense school to complete our team.
We had to create a game within 3 days about the theme ‘seduction’ that had to be operated with the ‘Foot Throttle’.

Foot Throttle
The Foot Throttle is a rehabilitation tool that allows elderly with rheumatism to train it’s lower leg muscles.
The device is part of the innovation 4 welfare: MRH project and will be used at home.

The Game
The player is an overlord that has to seduce it’s minions to work for him. Seducing your minions is done by completing special moves on the Foot Throttle.
This can be moving your feet up and down or sideways, depending on what task you want the minion to complete.
We provided an easy tutorial for the elderly players & created the game in a fairytale/fantasy style they can connect with & tell their (grand)children about.
Physiotherapists can also create their own levels to form tailor made exercises.
The judges liked these futures so much they chosen it as the winner of the Fontys Mechatronics Gamejam 2011.

The Future
The game will be extended and will be presented on the Mechatronics congress in September.

Links
Fontys Mechatronics Gamejam 2011 website
MRH project website
Minion Mechanics Twitter page
Download Gamejam version

Screenshots

Math Games
Formula Wars is one of the math games created for the Fontys Serious Gaming Lectorate that is doing research about motivating to learn.
The project is currently still in development and will be tested with various high school students.

Shooting Formulas
The game teaches kids how formula’s work by letting them play with the different parameters of a formula (for exmaple: aX+b).
Using the formulas of lines the players try to shoot the target of the enemy player.
Because the game will be played on secondary school, we developed the game especially for tablets. Developing on tablets makes it’s easier for us to user-test since this way we are independent of the hardware on schools.

Links
Lectorate Serious Gaming

Global Game Jam 2011
Purge was created during the Global Game Jam 2011, this was also the first gamejam I ever participated in.
In a gamejam the participants try to create a game in nothing more then 48 hours about a specified theme. The theme of that year was ‘extinction’.

Extinction
Very quickly we discovered that a lot of the group members had different ideas about the theme and how we should use it.
When you think about extinction a lot of clichés come to mind and we tried to stay away from those while others tried to completely use it as theme.
To fully capture extinction but yet no use clichés turned out to be very hard and we came up with a whole lot of concepts but they all had some kind of flaw in the mind of at least one or two members of the group. Eventually we just started something simple and tried to expand upon that idea.

The Game
The game we created can be best described as a tactical space shooter, the player controls a spaceship that has a single mission: destroy all planets in the galaxy!
Doing this however isn’t so easy, even with a giant laser mounted on top of your spaceship! The planet the player is about to destroy is in the middle of a war, two factions are fighting over the domination of the planet. At the start of the game the factions ignore the spaceship and the player has to dodge bullets & debris until his laser is charged to fire at the planet.
It takes 4 hits before the planet goes down & the factions are becoming more aggressive against the player as the game progresses and eventually they start to cooperate against you.

Post-mortem
The game had a lot of potential but it just wasn’t there, it missed a lot of things.
Also the group I worked with didn’t cooperate too well, there were a couple of people that kept having complete different ideas then the rest and couldn’t connect with the ideas of others.
It was also a bad idea to work with XNA in the end, the other programmer had a lot more experience then I did but had almost only worked in C++ and it was a long time ago since I worked with C# myself too so it could have gone a lot better. Yet I learned a lot from it and will definitely participate again next year! It is really amazing what you can do in only 48 hours and it is a great challenge!

Links
Purge on the Global Game Jam website

Screenshots

Original Concept
The game originally had to show kids what the circus is about and what preparations were made for the acts, but mainly it had to give kids interest in the circus. Several concepts had passed ranging from management games till platform building games until we reached or final concept: Human Cannonball (so simple it also became the title).

Old Circus Game Concept

Spectacular
The concepts that tried to teach kids about the preparations of the circus were pretty dull and failed to capture the real idea of the circus: spectacular acts! At this point we moved over from designing building & management games to games that were spectacular. We came up with two main acts that we’d like to use: aerial acrobatics on a trapeze & the human cannonball. We eventually went with the last one.

The Game
In order to still show what the circus is about we tried to use as much acts as possible inside our game. The player has to use the other attributes & acts in order to create an even bigger, spectacular act. Other attributes & acts are burning hoops, horses & trampolines. The levels start out very simple and become harder & spectacular every time. The end of the game is pretty tricky but in order to make it easier we gave the player feedback on what cannon power he or she used the last time and showed a trail behind the player.

The Process & Result
During the development of the game I was one of the 2 programmers but I also had a big impact on the design of the game.
The artwork was created by four other project members.
I developed my social skills & program skills a lot and am very happy with the result, especially after it was chosen ‘the best 2D flash game of the semester’!

Links
Human Cannonball on the Fontys Made website

Video

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Screenshots

Original Project
This game is basically nothing more but a prototype I created during the Game Technology lessons. I created it to test out pathfinding algorithms and had plans to turn it into an android game.
Since this is only a rough prototype and because of my plans to work on it for the future I can not show you any gameplay of the flash version, I can only show 2 small screenshots.

Future Plans
Mobile games need to be fast & easy so the player can play it everywhere, at any time. The game lives up to this by having a timed survival mode the player can play for as long as he or she wants to. The singleplayer campaign will be divided into a lot of smaller levels so the player can easily unlock new ones & stop at any point in the game but still can start where he or she left off by selection the last unlocked level.
The game was already designed with a mobile port in mind, so the controls are pretty simple: walk around with W, A, S, & D, aim with the mouse & shoot with the left mouse button. Mobile android devices can easily have a virtual joystick on the touch screen to walk around & another one to aim & shoot. Another option would be to walk & shoot towards the direction the player is touching on the screen, this is why I will probably implement multiple control schemes.
There will be different kind of zombies in the game each with it’s own abilities, the most zombies won’t be very strong but try to overwhelm the player by attacking in groups. These groups will then try to attack & slow down the player. Note that these groups won’t be very large because this would slow down the game on mobile devices. Occasionally these groups will appear in waves.
The player will get 3 different kind of weapons (rifles, melee weapons & projectiles) which can be collected trough pickups across the map. Other kinds of pickups are (health, adrenaline & munition).

Screenshots

The Program
The program consisted of 3 main parts: the editor, the simulator & the reports, in the first one you could create a roadplan for a city and in the second one you could load these ‘maps’ and run a traffic simulation on them. All simulations were recreatable and kept statistics that were saved on a database.

The Editor
This editor was my responsibility, here you could pick road tiles and place them on a grid. A road tile is either a straight road, a curved road, a t-junction, a crossroad or a viaduct. All tiles had an option to add pedestrian crossings or traffic light, and of course they could all be rotated.
Before a map was saved, the program would check if the created map was possible and only then it would be saved onto the database. A map would be impossible if road tiles with opposite endings would adjacent.

The Simulator
In the simulator the user could load a map from the database and add a number of cars to it. The cars would start driving along the road and stop for traffic lights, pedestrian crossings & other cars. Occasionally the cars would also park alongside the road and would drive trough again later.

The Reports
When a simulation was stopped, the user would see the report. These statistics are also uploaded onto the database and can be opened again later.
A report showed the user who started it, total simulation time, simulation speed, number of parked cars, number of blocked cars & the total number of processed cars.

Screenshots

Freedom
I started this project with the intention the give the player as much freedom as possible, doing this by making a relative open world in a small forest.
Limiting invisible wall to a minimum by only using them on the outer sides of the map. A dense group of trees in the middle of the map would block players from shooting, looking & walking trough but allowed certain classes to (rocket)jump over it to surprise the enemy. I created special class specific spots for every class to make it a fun and a different experience for everyone that played it.

Post-mortem
Because of the open environment and lack of invisible walls the player could literally stand everywhere it would like to, making it hard to regulate the players movement. Sightlines where covered up with trees but sniper managed to look trough a couple of branches or hide inside the trees making it only easier for snipers to instead of harder. Testing a lot & making a lot of revisions to the layout lead to a balanced and fun map in the end. Giving the player this freedom also led to another problem: optimization. The dense trees broke up sightlines but were not always suited for optimization such as occluders as it would only partly or irregularly break the sightlines.
Because of this experiment with freedom & invisible walls, I now have a much better understanding of when to use them or not. Invisible walls can be very bad and are better left out, but in some points it is better to use them as it can greatly improve the layout. I now also have a better understanding of how to use natural barriers and how to optimize them.

Links
Crosscut minisite

Screenshots

Original Project
This was my first ever game at Fontys, at this point I didn’t had any lessons in Game Design and didn’t know much about serious games, in fact I only just started programming. The game was built by 5 people and almost none of us could program so we kept it simple and tried to turn the popular Doodle Jump into a serious game. I almost completely programmed the game myself in about a week in XNA while the others created the artwork.

Gameplay
The game was designed to adapt to the players skills. The player needs to quickly solve small sums, the faster it does this the better it’s score.
The answer to the sums are displayed on small platforms, if the player lands on the platform with the right answer then he or she will jump up again and will get a new sum.
Because the player constantly falls down there is a possibility that he or she can’t solve it on time and miss the platform, this is why we added a boost the will allow the player to jump up again.
As the game progresses the sums are getting more difficult to solve & the player will fall down faster, if this seems to be too hard for the player then the game will pace down.

Post-mortem
Looking back on the game now there are a ton of things I would have done differently but there is one thing I didn’t know when I first started the project and that is how tried to make it a serious game. When I look back at it it just is a game with sums added to it. The game doesn’t teach you how to do mental calculations, it just gives the player a couple of sums to solve. The solving of the sums is not embedded in the gameplay very well.

Video

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Screenshots