Sander Hoogervorst

The Automatician is a 3-Dimensional puzzle game with an emphasis on immersion.

In The Automatician, players will explore a Victorian mansion at their leisure, as well as design and craft Rube Goldberg Machines to solve puzzles and uncover secrets.

I joined the team to sort out and rework the quest system and implement quests that were already designed.

The quest system created was functional, but the design team and Programmers never properly communicated which made the tool near impossible to use for the designed quests. Yet other systems were using the quest system so it could not be removed or easily altered.

I reworked the Quest system in Blueprints and created Actor Bases from which quest objects could inherent as well as Blueprint functions that in part still called the old quest system to set quest states. Additionally I documented the entire quest system so people knew how to use it and implemented 4 out of the total 5 quests using the new system.

Full List Personal Role & Tasks:
Technical Designer
Reworked quest system

Engine:
Unreal Engine 4

Platform:
PC

Personal Software, Tools & Programming language:
Blueprint visual scripting
Microsoft Word

Total Team Size:
33 team members

Personal time on team:
±15 weeks

I had to come up with a system that allowed the teacher to update the cards each week which would also support audio so the children could hear the word. In the end I created a system which would take a video and project them on the cards. The video holds both the card as well as the audio and are spaced 2 seconds apart. Simply said the system automatically divides the video into 2 second blocks and thus knows how many cards there are. Then it randomly grabs a set of those cards and once a card is turned it would play the 2 seconds of the video allocated to that specific card and project it on the card.

The video is uploaded on a server (the same that runs this website) and replacing the video replaces the cards. This means the children do not have to download a new version each time the cards need to be uploaded.

Engine:
Unity Engine

Platform:
PC
Mac

Personal Software, Tools & Programming language:
C#

Total Team Size:
Solo project

Development Duration:
±1 Week

– Acheron GDD [PDF]
Acheron_GDD_V3

Acheron is a 2.5D platformer game, designed initially for the PS4, in which the player simultaneously controls two characters who can exert forces on their surroundings.

My main focus within the development of Acheron was being a design lead and the main vision holder. I was not the only one making decisions, but I was the main communication facilitator between departments. I made sure that final decisions were made, documented, and the overall vision was kept within scope.

I also conceptualised mechanics for the game and made prototypes (visual scripting) for testing purposes as a technical designer. Additionally I implemented mechanics created by the programmers and edited them where needed.

Full List Personal ​Role & Tasks:
Lead designer
Vision holder
Communication facilitator
UX designer
Gameplay designer
Narrative designer

Engine:
Unreal Engine 4

Platform:
PC

​Personal Software, Tools & Programming language:
Blueprint visual scripting
Adobe Photoshop
Pivotal Tracker
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Excel

Total Team Size:
12 team members

Development Duration:
±15 Days (Over 15 weeks)

– Monskey Skate GDD [PDF]
Monskey-Skate-GDD-v1.4

Monskey Skate is a single player, 3D, 3rd person skate game developed for smart phones and tablets. It was a client project using the Monskey IP. The target audience of the game is children aged 7 to 9, and it is controlled using both the gyroscope and the touch screen of the device.

UX design was one of my main focuses on the project. It was important that the difficulty and feedback was aimed at the young audience, so the main focus of the game was to reward the player for doing well, but never to badly punish for making mistakes. The player would always get some form of reward, no matter their performance.

I also worked as a technical designer, implementing mechanics created by programmers, editing these where needed and creating simple scripts for the procedural generation of the game.

Lastly, I was the lead designer. I held the overall vision, made sure the project was within scope, in part wrote documentation and acted as the main communication facilitator between departments.

Full List Personal ​Role & Tasks:
Gameplay designer
Lead designer
Vision holder
Communication facilitator
UI designer
UX designer

Engine:
Unity

Platform:
Smart phone
Tablet

​Personal Software, Tools & Programming language:
Adobe Photoshop
Hansoft
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Excel
C#

Total Team Size:
11 team members

Development Duration:
±15 Days (Over 15 weeks)

Info
The following is a Blueprint example of the Conversation Manager I helped create.

Functions discription
-Gets dialogue from a Data table
-Enables the dialogue HUD
-Displays dialogue and character name on HUD
-Calculates words per minutes display time
-Seeks the characters that are talking to display icon above their head
-Auto next dialogue and end dialogue

-High quality link [PNG]
ConversationManager

Info
The following PDF is the mission design of the tutorial level. Note that the level has since gone to major itterations within the engine.

-Full view pdf [PDF]
FLO_MissionDesign_Mission1-Tutorial

Blank Slate is an angled top-down, 3D, squad-based, action stealth game in which the player character can take over up to two enemies at the time and use them as pawns to progress in the game.
The game is set in a dystopian world on an alternative timeline in which consumerism took a turn to the worse in a totalitarian regime.

My main focus on the project was technical designer; in this role I created documents covering mechanics in detail and in a practical sense for all departments. I conceptualised mechanics and gameplay features, and in many cases I have created prototypes, made adjustments or created new entities within Blueprints (visual scripting) – scripting mechanics, simple AI and gameplay scenarios.

Additionally I was a level and gameplay designer. I would take the existing narrative and use it to create a mission structure, following by translating this mission into level design and implementing mechanics and features in the level to make it playable. The main level I worked on was the tutorial level in which, additionally to normal mission and level design, mechanics also needed to be introduced in a natural way with a proper difficulty curve.

Full List Personal Role & Tasks:
Technical Designer
Lead designer (Pre-production)
Gameplay designer
Level designer
Mocap actor
Writing technical design documents

Engine:
Unreal Engine 4

Platform:
PC

Personal Software, Tools & Programming language:
Blueprint visual scripting
Adobe Photoshop
Pivotal Tracker
Houdini (via in-house created Unreal plugin)
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Visio

Total Team Size:
42 team members

Development Duration:
±40 weeks

– Rising Tides GDD [PDF]
Rising-Tide-Game-Design-Document-V0.4

Rising Tides is a 5 player competitive card game with a supporting app that adds an overarching time pressure and random events. Each player can only do one action a turn. The faster the player ends his/her turn, the faster it is their turn again, but so is the opponents’ turn.

Rising Tides was quite a different, yet refreshing, experience. Not only was it a card game, something I had not yet developed before, but the other team members had never created a game before.

My main role was to design the game and make the ideas of other team members practical and possible to implement. I created an easy to work with template to keep track of rules, alterations and help along with playtesting and the quick iterative process. Later I also wrote the GDD, if we want to further develop the game.

Additionally I scripted certain functions to help out the programmer who was creating the app for the game.

Full List Personal ​Role & Tasks:
General Designer
Gameplay designer
Scripting (C#)

Engine:
Unity

Platform:
Physical (Cards)
Smart phone (App)
Tablet (App)
PC (App)

​Personal Software, Tools & Programming language:
Adobe Photoshop
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Excel
C#

Total Team Size:
5 team members (non-game developers)

Development Duration:
48 hours