Her­ald is an award-win­ning nar­ra­tive game by Wisp­fire about colo­nial­ism in the 19th cen­tu­ry, in which play­ers expe­ri­ence an adven­ture with lots of dra­mat­ic twists aboard the HLV Herald.

I was in charge of set­ting up sto­ry scenes for Book 3 of Her­ald. By plac­ing char­ac­ters, cam­era posi­tions, and props, then sequenc­ing the dia­log texts and ani­ma­tions with Wisp­fire’s in-house dia­log edi­tor, I helped imple­ment the vision of the writer and ani­ma­tors into the game. I also worked a lot on QA, both report­ing and fix­ing bugs, for which I was cred­it­ed in Her­ald Patch 1.2.0.

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A dia­log tree I set up using Wisp­fire’s in-house dia­log branch editor. 

Exam­ple of a dia­log & cam­era work in Herald. 

A scene from the game with lots of actors pass­ing a bun­dle across the ship deck. 

I worked in Uni­ty Time­lines to help bring more com­plex scenes to life. 

Exam­ple of com­po­si­tion & cam­era work on a scene I made. 

Exam­ple of how dialogs from the edi­tor appear in the run­ning game. 

Putting togeth­er scenes involved sequenc­ing and tim­ing event for mul­ti­ple actors and props. 

(…) Tom’s work has enriched our team dur­ing his intern­ship with his can-do atti­tude, we believe he is a great asset to any team as a design­er with good pro­gram­ming knowledge.
—Roy van der Schilden, Wisp­fire founder

Winkelt­je is a shop­keep­ing game by Sassy­bot, where play­ers can cus­tomize their shop by plac­ing fur­ni­ture, items to sell, dec­o­ra­tions, and plan­ning the build­ing layout.

I was respon­si­ble for com­ing up with new sys­tems to sup­port the long-term engage­ment of play­ers, bal­anc­ing, mak­ing con­tent and imple­ment­ing it with C#. I also helped with com­mu­ni­ty man­age­ment and QA. I’m also cred­it­ed for the Dutch trans­la­tion of Winkelt­je, and helped set up a com­mu­ni­ty trans­la­tion process for oth­er languages.

Arbo­re­al is a year-long project to cre­ate a game in the vein of Stardew Val­ley and Har­vest Moon—a laid back farm­ing and adven­ture game.

I did mar­ket research, UX strat­e­gy, and UI and UX design for this project with Unre­al’s GUI edi­tor and Blueprints.

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Dur­ing pre-pro­duc­tion, we did tar­get audi­ence research. We researched our ref­er­ence games, their sales, com­mu­ni­ties, and sur­veyed 400 play­ers. Of the sur­vey data, we made this graph of play­er motivations. 

Mock­up of the inven­to­ry screen. We start­ed focus­ing on con­troller sup­port, and the UI had to be rethought because of this. 

Sec­ond ver­sion of the inven­to­ry in the game, pro­duced by artists. 

Exam­ple of a blue­print I wrote for a world map. 

Orig­i­nal ver­sion of the dia­log screen. The dia­log choic­es are spread out in a + shape to avoid that play­ers will be biased towards the first choice in the list. 

Ear­ly iter­a­tion of the dia­log sys­tem in-game, pro­duced by artists. 

Mobil­i­ty! is the side project I’ve devel­oped for two years. Born out of my love for pre­ci­sion plat­form­ers, my goal was allow­ing as many play­ers as pos­si­ble to enjoy the game! It was fea­tured by itch.io, PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shot­gun, and select­ed for INDIGO 2018. I kept a devlog with notes about new addi­tions or changes made dur­ing devel­op­ment, which you can ref­er­ence here.

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In Mobil­i­ty, the goal is to touch every plat­form on the lev­el, so I designed the lev­els to be open and allow dif­fer­ent approaches. 

Mobil­i­ty has mul­ti­ple dif­fi­cul­ty set­tings and oth­er acces­si­bil­i­ty options to help new play­ers ease into the pre­ci­sion plat­former genre. 

The game has four worlds, each with their own over­world, lev­els, and story. 

Part of the Trel­lo board that served as a to-do list and changel­og dur­ing development. 

R4Heal Inter­ac­tive Puz­zles is a col­lec­tion of seri­ous games by Yel­low Rid­ers for elder­ly reha­bil­i­tat­ing patients, com­mis­sioned by Rad­boudumc (a hos­pi­tal in Nijmegen, the Nether­lands). It con­tains clas­sic games such as word search­es and Sudoku, but also more “seri­ous” games such as reac­tion and breath­ing tests.

I was respon­si­ble for main­tain­ing the games, doing QA and fix­ing bugs, as well as imple­ment­ing new games from scratch by brief­ing. For this, I worked with Type­script code and InCourse, Yel­low Rid­ers’ in-house game engine.

“How to make a good puz­zle” is an arti­cle with playable exam­ples (an ‘explorable’) for the Explorables Jam 2018.

I present a series of puz­zle design guide­lines that I use for my own games like Tahi­ra’s Tow­er and Sokobanana, and pro­vide playable exam­ples, often a bad­ly designed exam­ple and a good one. These allow the play­er to learn the sub­ject mat­ter bet­ter by see­ing and expe­ri­enc­ing dif­fer­ent designs. It was one of Nicky Case’s cho­sen high­lights for the jam.

Edge of the Sky is a board game I designed from scratch. Play­ers explore a game world that’s con­stant­ly expand­ing on the look­out for ele­ments, which give points when matched togeth­er. Edge of the Sky was released as print & play game on itch.io, and a sin­gle pro­to­type ver­sion of final­ized qual­i­ty was made using the board game work­shop. It was shown on the IGAD Show­case Day as a “Best of the Year” project.

Other projects

Hidden Listener

I attend­ed the Glob­al Game Jam with two pro­gram­mers and one artist. My goal was to just expe­ri­ence an on-site game jam, and to have a lot of fun mak­ing a game! The theme was Trans­mis­sion, so we made an espi­onage game set dur­ing a war.
Download Global Game Jam Entry

BackFlipped

A sub­mis­sion for js13k 2019, where entrants get a month to make a 13kb brows­er game. I made an end­less-style game where you keep flip­ping between the back- and fore­ground of each lev­el. Playable on both desk­top and mobile.
Play Source Code

Tahira’s Tower

A 3D ver­sion of Sokoban, the clas­sic box push­ing game, result­ing in a hard but fair ambi­ent puz­zle game. Sokoban has also inspired some of my oth­er projects, like Picross Push­ers, com­bin­ing Picross and Sokoban, and Sokobanana, which adds a slip­ping mechan­ic to the mix. Play in browser Source Code

jumpNULL

Orig­i­nal­ly a week-long solo game jam game (in which I had to make a Game Boy inspired game), I con­tin­ued devel­op­ing it as a mobile game. It’s a metroid­va­nia in which the play­er can­not jump, allow­ing lev­els to fit on sin­gle screens. 

Play in browser