Wasteland 3

Squad-based RPG from inXile entertainment featuring challenging tactical turn-based combat

I worked on Wasteland 3 for almost a year leading up to its release. My main contribution is the perks and quirks system. I worked closely together with designers, programmers and artists to create a system that allowed the designers to implement the majority of the perks. For the remaining perks that were too specific for a general approach, I wrote custom code. In both cases I exposed the variables so it can easily be tweaked and balanced by designers down the line, without the interference of a programmer. Other areas I worked in are the combat system, vehicle and character/vehicle customisation. Towards the end of the project I worked on bugfixes in most areas of the game.

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GRID

The first AAA game I have worked on at Climax, released for PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One

Climax Studios is a work for hire studio, allowing me to work on a wide range of games. The first big game I worked on is GRID, a racing game by Codemasters written in their custom EGO engine. I worked on the game for the last 6 months before release. This meant that a lot of the systems were already in place and a big part of the job was getting to know the code adn building on it. I worked on various tasks covering a broad range of subjects, such as UI, the replay system and input. I also created some small tools in the game to help QA track down some issues. The last few months were spent fixing as much bugs as possible across the systems I had looked at before and a few new systems as well. This is the first AAA game I have worked on and even though racing games is not favourite genre, I enjoyed working on it and learning a lot of new things about gamedevelopment, not in the least about developing for consoles.

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F1 2020

The official racing game by Codemasters

After Grid I worked F1 2020 for some weeks. While my contributions were minor, it did give me some insight and experience with the Stadia platform.

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Torn

Brains Eden 2019 entry

To cap of my time as a student I participated in Brains Eden, an International gamejam for students held at the Angela Ruskin University in Cambridge. I participated with a team of 5, 3 artists and 2 programmers. The team of the gamejam was chain reaction. We decided pretty early on to go for the storytelling award. Gameplay wise are there two players, one in the normal world and one in the spiritworld. This spiritworld is represented by a mirrored version of the normal world (yes, we took some inspiration from Stranger Things). The two worlds are torn apart and the players must work together to reunite the two worlds by pulling on the chains connecting the two worlds. pulling one chain in one world disturbs the balance of the other world, so players have to work together to win. To further drive home the cooperation only a small part of the world is visible for each player, relative to the position of the other player. This is one of those games that is hard to explain. If this piqued your interest, head over to itch.io to download the game and play it yourself or you can watch the trailer below.

Torn Gameplay Trailer from Lukas Boonen on Vimeo.

What did I do? I worked on the main gameplay elements. I made the system of the chains and platforms, helped out on the rocks that fall and added the cinematics to convey the story. Our other programmer, Stijn Billiet worked mostly on the rendering code for the lighting effect and other gameplay tasks. While our Artists, Lukas Boonen, Piter Hillewaert and Annelien Heyninck created all the assets and sound.

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Outta Da Way

A chaotic sidescrolling PVP endless runner

This is a project I made together with two other programmers and two artists in Unity. It is an offline multiplayer game where the goal is to survive as long as possible while trying to defeat your opponents. The various traps and powerups scattered through the procedurally generated level make for a fun and chaotic experience where two games are never truly the same.



What did I do? The main thing I worked on was the procedural generation of the level and the background. I made sure that the level was created a little bit ahead of the camera and deleted a little bit behind the camera, all while making sure the level made sense. for example making sure the highest level only starts when it is possible to reach it and spawning falling spikes straps only when the level above is active, so they are not floating in the air. The frequency of the different traps and powerups spawn can be configured in the menu if you really like (or dislike) certain items.

In order to play the game as intended you will need at least 2 controllers (maximum 4), but to get an idea of the game you can “play” it solo as well.
Download: itch.io

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2D game engine

A 2D game engine based off Minigin

In this project I created a 2D game engine based off Minigin. I also created a version of pacman in this engine to show how it works. A detailed discription of the engine can be found in the readme on the git repository. In this repository also contains builds and the sourcecode.

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Interior mapping

A shader project implementing all shader pipeline stages

The goal of this project was to create shaders using every stage of the programmable shader pipeline. After playing Spider-man for the PS4 I was intrigued by the interiors of the buildings and after some research I learned they used a technique called interior mapping. My first goal was to implement a version of this.

When this was working I continued on the other pipeline stages. I made the building dynamic, allowing to select a number of floors, rooms and dimensions of the building. I added the possibility to generate it completely on the gpu from this info and a position. For the ground I used a single quad that gets tesselated and a heightmap. Finally I added a Depth of Field effect using post processing.

This project uses a render framework from Abertay University.

The source code and an executable can be found on bitbucket.

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Pirates!

Arcade pirate game where you aim for the highest score

In this arcade style pirate game the goal is to achieve the highest possible score before the time runs out. Points are scored by destroying the cannons on the forts and the enemy ships on the sea. Certain powerups can be collected to give the player a slight advantage such as higher speed, lower cooldown on the cannons and healing.

This game was made using C++ and the DAE game engine which uses SDL.
The code and a build can be found in the git repository.
The sprites used for this project come from http://kenney.nl/

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GOAP AI

An AI bot using Goal Oriented Action Planning

The assignment was to create a bot for the hostprogram that could survive as long as possible. One of the requirements was to research an AI topic that was not covered in class.

I researched and implemented a GOAP (Goal Oriented Action Planning) system to power my bot. The main idea behind GOAP is to give the bot a set of goals to achieve and a set of actions it can perform. The bot will then search for a path between a number of these actions to reach its goals.
The big advantage of a system like this is the possibility to expand it later on as the project grows.

The code for this project can be found in the git repository.

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Zombie Steve’s Prison Break Adventure

Puzzle Platforming Game

This is a puzzle platforming game where you play as Steve and try to escape from his prison. By using the B, X and Y buttons on the controller you can toggle the objects of the according color between two states and create a path to escape.

This game uses the Overlord Engine. The overlord engine was written by the lectors of DAE and during the fourth semester I added more features to it in class. The Engine is written in C++ and uses Nvidia Physx and Fmod.

The character model and animations are from Mixamo. and the other models were made by myself (programmer-art!).

The code and a build can be found in the git repository. A controller is required to play the game.

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Broken world shader

break the world using a geometry shader

The goal of this project was to make something intersting with a geometry shader. The shader breaks up the model into the separate triangles and moves these away from a point in the world. The small island that does not get broken up can be made larger or smaller. The shader itself can be found here.

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3D Art

This is not what I am good at, but I did some 3D

I am not an artist, but I have some experience in 3D modeling. This gives me an understanding of how 3D modeling, texturing, PBR maps are made even though this is not my forte. This experience does make it a bit easier to work together with artists and communicate while working on projects. Most of my “art” should never see the light of day, but this knife is a model I am quite proud of.

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