Project Details
- Team Size: 30 people
- Role: Technical Designer
- Duration: Full Time
- Platform: PC Windows
- Engine: Unreal Engine 4
- Genre: 3D Action Platformer
Recognition
- Steam – 50k Downloads
- Breda University – Best Third Year Game (2018)
- Breda University – Industry Day Third Year Audience Award (2018)
Project Goal
Contribution
Rapid Prototyping
Realising prototypes for different traversal and combat mechanics, based on both my own designs and those of my team mates’.
Combat Design
Fleshing out combat mechanics with fellow designers in the combat design feature team.
Presenting our feature team’s progress to the rest of the team during weekly progress update pitches, and daily collect our progress during stand up and present to our to our producer and leads during scrum of scrums.
Collaborating with other designers in the progression and level design feature teams to design complementary gameplay systems.
Technical Level Design
Implementing concepts for level mechanics and hazards, necessary to my fellow level designer to realise their level designs.
Level Design
Collaborating in the design process for a chunk-based procedural level generation system, together with my fellow level designers and the programmer responsible for procedural generation.
Designing and whiteboxing level chunks used for the level generation.
Encounter Design
Designing possible enemy encounters that could procedurally spawn in the level chunks I designed.
Bugfixing, Tweaking, Optimisation
Responsible for providing technical assistance to 3D and VFX artists with in-engine assets implementation and optimisation, tweaking existing mechanics to achieve the intended game feel, troubleshooting and fixing bugs, optimise code and remove redundant code where possible.
Cinematics
Creating and rendering cinematics used in the Steam trailer, based on the vision from the design lead. Creating and implementing main menu camera panning animation.
Post Launch Support
Working by myself on a patch for the third anniversary of the game release, to address players’ feedback. Featuring: many quality of life improvements to platforming and combat, rebalanced AI and progression, additional VFX and SFX, improved UI navigation, performance optimisations, bug fixes, framerate cap toggle, and remappable input.
Project Details
- Team Size: 30 people
- Role: 3C Designer
- Duration: Temporary
- Platform: PC Windows
- Engine: Unreal Engine 4
- Genre: Adventure Open World
Recognition
- Breda University – Best Design Third Year (2018)
Project Goal
Contribution
Game Camera
The game camera needed iteration late in the project. I consulted the different feature teams to understand what each needed to be improved and what limitations I would have to avoid disrupting existing systems and visual assets. I presented the team with proposals fitting those limitations, and the team picked their favourite iteration.
Controls System
The controls system had to be redesigned to be more consistent across different input devices.
I worked in collaboration with the gameplay designer and UI developers to redesign and iterate the Controls System, by looking at popular titles and playtesting Controls prototypes with external playtesters.
Cinematics Creation
Created short in-engine cinematics, recorded gameplay footage, and edited 2 short trailers used during the alpha stage of the project.
Project Details
- Team Size: 8 people
- Role: 3C Programmer
- Duration: 48 hours
- Platform: PC Windows
- Engine: Unreal Engine 4
- Genre: Action
Project Goal
Team entry for Global Game Jam 2021. Creating a third person action game boss fight.
Contribution
Combat Mechanics
Designing and implementing the player combat mechanics. Also created some of the particle effects to convey game feel and player affordances.
Animation Programming
Implementing and blending character animations.
UI/UX
Designing and implementing the startup screen and pause menu, and realising the game win cutscene.
Gameplay Trailer
Shooting and editing the gameplay trailer.
Project Details
- Team Size: Solo
- Role: Programmer
- Duration: 1 month
- Platform: PC Windows
- Engine: Unreal Engine 4
- Genre: Action Sandbox
Project Goal
Contribution
Character, Camera, Controls
Designing and implementing the player movement and combat mechanics, top down camera, and game controls.
Gameplay Programming
Designing and implementing main gameplay loop, local leaderboard backend, and supporting mechanics such as destroyable environment.
AI Programming
Implementing roaming pedestrians and hostile NPCs.
UI/UX
Designing and implementing main HUD, diegetic UI elements, leaderboard screen, and pause menu.
Gameplay Trailer
Shooting and editing the gameplay trailer.
Project Goal
Recreating the modular weapon-based combat framework from Dark Souls in Unreal Engine.
Learning Points
Making use of class inheritance principles and data structures to engineer a modular combat framework where the data driving the player attacks is stored onto a weapon archetype actor, allowing for a modular combat framework where the player is able to equip and unequip different weapons on their character actor to gain access to different moves with different properties, such as range, speed, and damage dealt.
Logic States and Animation Cancelling
Writing logic to handle the different logic states a character actor can be during a combat scenario, such as ‘attacking’, evading, blocking, stunned, and idle, and transitioning between these states that can be triggered by player input or when receiving damage from an opponent, accounting from whether a transition between 2 given states should be allowed or not as established in the given design.
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| “Functions to handle equipping and making use of weapon on primary and secondary hand. Supporting both melee and ranged weapons.” | “Data structures used to store attack data inside weapon archetypes, to achieve a modular combat system.” |
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| “Animation notifiers used to synchronise scripted behaviours, such as hitbox damage frames and snapping the character actor to its intended target, to the animation.” |
Talks on game design I gave at Breda University.
Understanding physics to make tight platforming.
Postmortem: VR Jam 2020.
Prototyping punch mechanic in Unreal, step-by-step tutorial.
Rayman 2 & 3: comparing combat and platforming design philosophies.
Hobbies:
• Cooking
• Movies
• Action Adventure Games
• Tabletop Games
• Game Jams
Favourite Titles:
• Spyro the Dragon
• Sly Cooper
• Kingdom Hearts
• The Elder Scrolls
• Undertale
• The Outer Wilds
• What Remains of Edith Finch
I am a very skilled technical game designer with a bachelor’s degree in ‘Creative Media and Game Technologies’ from the NHTV Breda University in the Netherlands.
I have always been an extremely creative individual with a strong attitude for problem solving.
I first started programming during high school by taking a 1 year professional course in Java on the side.
I applied my knowledge in Java programming to teach myself C# and starting to prototype my game ideas in Unity.
Thanks to my game prototypes, I was later accepted into Breda University, where I started working in Unreal Engine.
I currently have about 5 years of experience working in Unreal, and I possess a thorough knowledge of the engine’s best practices and tools.
I mostly focus on game feel and working with game characters, cameras, and controls system, but I also have a generalist game design skillset and a good understanding of single player level design principles.
I thrive working in a multidisciplinary team environment, I am very proficient with my communication and documentation skills.
My ambition in this industry is to deliver games that will set the bar for how the game character feels for games going forward.