Context: Freelance Puzzle Design
Year: 2023
Tools: Unity3D
Credits: Frambosa (Jonathan Barbossa), Tom van Der Linden, Sam Shandley, & others (ongoing)
For Frambosa I designed and built some 50 puzzle levels for their upcoming title 'Billy Bumbum.'
I also did some testing and design consulting.
Context: Environment Art Solo Project
Year: 2022
Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Blender 3.0, Photoshop, Illustrator
Credits: Joram Wolters
Based on a course by Stylized Station
To transfer from Unity to Unreal Engine, and to up my environment art skills I completed this course.
Learning goals were
- Producing game-ready environment art assets in Blender using high-poly to low-poly bake workflows.
- Learning to work with UE5 node-based shaders and materials.
- Learning how to work with UE5 Niagara VFX
- Learning how to work with UE5 Lumen Lighting.
Apart from learning UE5, one of my goals this project was to learn Blender. I have always worked with Maya and was curious how Blender would work. I was extremely pleasantly surprised at how well it worked and am excited to work more with Blender in the future! In blender I did all the rough modelling, sculpting and baking.
My favorite part about this course is learning how to make Runtime Virtual Texture shaders, you can do fun things like sample a colormap or heightmap to drive effects in your shader.
I also really enjoyed this method for making stylized trees, it makes it really easy to tweak the look of trees by swapping out some colors. The canopy mesh and leaf masks can also be swapped out if needed.
I also made some simple particles using Niagara. Though I have a lot of VFX experience using Unity's Shuriken system, Niagara works fundamentally differently and I'm looking forward to diving further into it!
My favorite thing on any project is lighting and post processing, and UE5 goes HARD on these aspects, I spent a lot of time on it (while keeping the lighting set up very simple) and still feel like I've only scratched the surface of what UE5 can do!
Context: DND Adventure Guide
Year: ---
Tools: Photoshop
Credits: Joram Wolters
You are a band of adventurers who have been working for a man named Sir Rodrick Kneelman.
He reaches out to your band and asks you to investigate a weird occurrence involving fruits and vegetables..
This is a homebrew dnd5 campaign I have been writing and playing for the past couple of years.
This year I will play it through with one more table before compiling it into a guide for people to download and play.
It features an illustrated twenty page campaign guide, papercraft character mini's, five illlustrated encounter maps, item cards and other hand-outs. Play time is roughly 6-10 four hour sessions.
Context: PC game
Year: TBA
Platforms: Windows
Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Blender, Photoshop
Credits:
Joram Wolters
Annie Manueke
HANA is a narrative puzzle game that explores a woman's transformation from daughter to mother as she deals with sudden loss and grief.
The game is mostly about exploration and finding the strength to keep going, as you nurture trees back to life and find your way out of the depths.
HANA is made possible thanks to support from Stimuleringsfonds
Context: Game Jam
Year: 2013
Platforms: Windows
Tools: Game Maker, Photoshop
Credits:
Tom Mourik
Tom van der Linden
Joeri van Ees
Kjell 't Hoen
Michiel Nijhof
Joram Wolters
The Awesome In-House Gamejam was a bunch of friends having a gamejam together.
We made a platformer that looked friendly on the face of it, but revealed a darker world every time you got hurt.
Context: Solo Project
Year: 2013
Platforms: Windows
Tools: Game Maker, Photoshop
Top-Down Cadet is a little top down flyer-shooter game I made to teach myself gamemaker, GML and functional art.
It's a local multiplayer shmup where one player can spawn waves of fighter planes and the other player has to take them down.
Cheats
- Home: restart game
- Esc :quit game at any time
- end: player HP + 1
- delete: player Cannon +1
Context: Global Game Jam
Year: 2018
Platforms: Windows
Tools: Unity, Photoshop
Credits:
Lance Krasniqi
Viktor Trisjin
Joram Wolters
You're an interstellar gateway operator! Your job is to make sure every ship in the 'verse arrives at their desired destination. How? Just connect two gateways on your monitor screen using cables and make sure those travelers go through safely.
For this gamejam I did the UI design and animation, 2D art and collaborated on game design.
Context: Ludum Dare 40
Year: 2017
Platforms: Windows, WebGL
Tools: Unity, Maya, Photoshop
Credits:
Lance Krasniqi
Viktor Trisjin
Stijn Delaruelle
Toon Delaruelle
Joram Wolters
ARRRR ME HEARTIES! You just completed a good ol’ raid and now it’s time to set sail to yer own cove. There’s only one tiny little problem: your ship’s wheel broke off. But with some skill you can still steer the ship back home! Collect shiny loot on your way home, and balance it on the ships deck to steer it in the right direction. But beware of the enemies! Kill ‘em by shooting your loot on their ships. Just drag it into the cannons and FIRE! No more loot left? Maybe that broken wheel can still be of use… The goal: keep yer shit straight and get to the pub! Drink up me hearties!
For this gamejam I did the UI design and animation, some vfx and level design. I also contributed on game design.
Context: Game Release
Year: 2020
Platforms: Windows, Nintendo Switch
Tools: Photoshop
Credits:
Yellowcake Games
Lance Krasniqi
Viktor Trisjin
Joram Wolters
A roguelike survival adventure with an ever changing world
Break out the deep prison and escape this subterranean dungeon 35 floors underground.
This side-project was primarely done by Lance Krasniqi and Viktor Trisjin. I helped by providing some of the splash art, the animated logo and the promotion art.
Context: Console Game Release
Year: 2022
Platforms: Nintendo Switch
Tools: Unity, Maya, Photoshop, FMOD, Audition, Animate
Credits:
Yellowcake Games
Lance Krasniqi
Viktor Trisjin
Joram Wolters
Dashing Dodgems is a fast-paced multiplayer game about destroying cities and friendships!
In it players drive bumper cars to knock eachother into the water - last car driving wins. Don't take too long though, the environment will start to collapse.
Show your friends who's boss through visceral gameplay, in a world in which nobody is ever really hurt.
Contributions
On Dashing Dodgems I worked on many different aspects, as tends to happen in indie development.
My contributions encompass Game Design, Level Design, Visual FX, Sound FX, Texturing, User Interface, Illustration, promotion, business development, production and more.
On this page I have collected some of the work I am most proud of, if you are curious about my other contributions you are more than welcome to get in touch.
Level Design
I designed and built seven out of eight playable maps for Dashing Dodgems. Each map has a unique lay-out that matches a certain theme, playmode, or play style.
The maps are all centered around the idea that we want players to constantly circle back to each other in big loops, so that even if someone drives away from the pack they will always eventually find themselves driving right back to them. This matched best with the design pillars that we set out at the beginning of development.
UI Design
One of my biggest tasks, and the one that required the most intense collaboration was UI design. I ended up designing all of Dashing Dodgem's ui and building it in Unity Canvas. Lance built custom button input on top of that to make sure it worked with having multiple controllers that could disconnect and reconnect at any time. The UI design and implementation process was a strongly collaborative and iterative process.
Dashing Dodgems being an indie game, I was also involved in a lot of those little tasks that fall between main dev tasks, most notably I
- Built and maintained all the Yellowcake Games websites using wordpress and Fresh Builder
- Created all the sfx with foley recording, audition and FMOD, with exception of the music, which was handled by Manglemoose
- Handled a lot of the outreach to publishers and funds, usually in close collaboration.
- Created all the graphics and logos for our socials, store pages etc.
- Handled all illustration work for splash screens, loading screens, posters, banners, printables, stickers etc.
- Recorded gameplay footage and cinematic footage
- worked closely with Annie Manueke on storyboarding and editting all the trailers.
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