Bobismijnnaam's Portfolio 🎮

Last updated: 2018-06-30

Hi, and welcome to my portfolio/game showcase! On this page I list the (worthwile) games that don't fit into other categories. You can peruse them at your own pace, or use the various filters at your disposal below to narrow down the scope. If you're in a hurry have a look at the Top-9, complete with illustrative gifs!

If this page interests you be sure to also take a look at the other two showcases linked below. While I don't keep them updated anymore like the page you're currently reading, the games they contain are not any less fun. Also most of the games on those pages are not on display on this page, so if you're short on time choose wisely ;)

My personal Top 9

The amount of games I have on display here is quite large for those who only have time for a quick scroll. Therefore, to speed up those under pressure I have made a selection of games that I am currently the most proud of. They are listed in no particular order. Clicking on them should take you to either an info page about the game or a section in the library below.


Other interesting showcases

#1GAM 2013
#1GAM page and my own

A year in which I worked on a new game each and every month, resulting in twelve games in total. Check out the page for a few desktop and even a few web games!

1MGD
1MGD page

A friend and I set out to get a million downloads. We failed, but it did yield a few interesting games!

Filter games

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Games

A Major Mystery

2014-12-08

According to the Ludum Dare legacy website, this is actually my first real entry to Ludum Dare! I submitted it to Ludum Dare #31, back in december 2014. I remember it being a fun weekend - if I recall correctly I spent some time with Walnoot who released the game zoom that weekend! I also spend quite some time fighting with the compiler and my custom game development library, as was customary back when I was using MinGW on Windows. Luckily, that didn't stop me!

While this game is not very exciting, I think it's actually quite polished in terms of graphics, gameplay, and UI, and is in a sense also original. It's just quite slow, a lot slower than a gamejam game is supposed to be.

For completeness, here are the ratings I received during LD31:

Rank Category Rating
#185 Humor 3.18
#283 Innovation 3.53
#510 Theme 3.63
#636 Fun 3.00
#664 Mood 2.82
#691 Graphics 2.87
#860 Overall 2.90
#1385 Coolness 49%

A Nuclear Crossroads

2015-04-20

My entry for Ludum Dare #32! I again did this Ludum Dare together with Walnoot, which was fun!

I kind of remember this being my first try at making a point-and-click game, and actually not totally failing. I also remember discovering how much effort it is to get custom per-view logic in the game, and accidentally/in the process implementing a JSON-based DSL for the game. While this was quite fun and simplified a few things, it also massively complicated a few others. All in all it was a great jam and I had a lot of fun cobbling together a point and click game + interpreter :-)

For completeness, these are the ratings I received for the game:

Rank Category Rating
#344 Humor 3.13
#498 Fun 3.12
#596 Mood 2.88
#599 Overall 3.12
#630 Theme 3.25
#681 Graphics 2.85
#735 Innovation 2.83
#1601 Coolness 42%

Bee Gone

2016-04-17

This is probably one of my favourite games as well. I had a few small tech demo's of experience with Lua and Love2D. With perfect timing the time came for Ludumdare #35, and I immediately knew what tools I was going to use.

The theme was actually quite controversial in my case. Initially I had a game in mind where you would have to shapeshift to attack enemies in a sort-of top down combat game. However, as I ironed out the basic mechanics for moving around in the game world I found out that it was actually already quite a lot of fun to just shoot around the ball. By then I also had a basic shapeshifting mechanic implemented, that is, I could morph a triangle into a circle and back. I added a few simple enemies, found out the game was simple and satisfying, and stuck with it. I added very very basic graphics, slow-motion, and a nice color-shifting rectangle to indicate how hard you would shoot. By then most of saturday had passed, and I decided to go into polishing mode; the game was complex enough by then for a gamejam.

I spent the sunday whipping up some simple graphics and doing the finishing touches (instructions, score, physics finetuning).

What I liked the most about developing Bee Gone. was the level of abstraction I was working at. I'm used to working in C++ with SDL, which is usually at quite a low level of abstraction. Love2D allowed me to try random stuff out with their built-in modules like physics, which gave me the room I needed to end up with this game.

The downsides are the arguments used in the usual "static vs. dynamic" debate (specifically in the context of Lua): hard to properly structure code, nil errors, 1 indexing, etcetera. Those things don't usually bother me that much but if there'd be a more strict alternative I wouldn't mind handing in some of the flexibility that Lua has. In any case, they weren't really the fault of Love2D. Their API design and documentation is pretty great.

For completeness, here are the ratings I got for the game during Ludum Dare 35:

Rank Category Rating
#68 Fun 3.86
#235 Innovation 3.50
#289 Overall 3.41
#296 Humor 2.70
#570 Mood 2.76
#627 Graphics 2.71
#857 Theme 2.52
Coolness 56%

Bunny Killer

2016-11-24

Bunnykiller was our submission for Inter-Actief's third (I think I lost cound) gamejam. I was working together with Hanne Oosterhuis, Willem Siers, Ruben Haasjes, and Walnoot.

We had an initial brainstorm at the beginning of the weekend, and concluded that while we wanted something cute and interesting, we also wanted something finished and polished. The theme was "consequences", if I recall correctly. Our first draft of the idea was that you could use bunnies to get the game objective ("save the planet" or something) done, but of course using too much bunnies would be unethical and make other bunnies angry. We also wanted to put a feature in the game where you would have to sometimes talk with the bunnies. This would cause the player to bond with the bunnies, which would actually make it harder to not use them sparingly.

In the end, we did end up with something cute and polished. We didn't get the whole "consequences" theme in there, as bunnies are basically infinite in each level, and they don't really seem to care about that. All in all it was fun to make a game together and I like the result a lot!

Ce n'est pas un jeu de pointer-et-cliquer

2018-04-24

This is my official entry into Ludum Dare #41! Check the official submission out here.

This game is special! I made it as an entry for Ludum Dare #41, so on one hand I wanted to give it my all. On the other hand, that same weekend the Batavierenrace was planned. And while I really wanted to fully participate in Ludum Dare, I also didn't want to miss the party(s). So I tried combining them, in which I mildly succeeded: I did manage to get a game done with a quality I am satisfied with, but I didn't get as much time in as I would've wanted normally. However, that was to be expected.

In short, my intention with the game was to create a thought experiment on the question if one can combine the genre of point-and-click games with the genre of still-life paintings. Of course you can combine them, but at first glance you would expect that to yield a very unimpressive game. You can look around, walk around, but nothing can ever, will ever change, because it is a still life. Or is it? That's exactly what my game is trying to discuss when you play it.

If you'd like to read a complete "explanation" of the game as I intended it, check my blog post here. Spoiler alert, obviously. However, be warned: if you like mysterious and vague games, reading the explanation behind it might deteriorate the experience!

If you're interested in the reasoning behind how I arrived at a genre like this, read my other blog post: An Algebra of Genres or: How I Discovered more Depth in the LD41 Theme.

For completeness I will post the ratings I will get for this game here. In total during the whole LD41, there were 3049 submissions, 149 unfinished submissions, and 3629 unpublished submissions.

Category Place Average
Overall 819th 3.217 average from 32 ratings
Fun 996th 2.800 average from 32 ratings
Innovation 681st 3.241 average from 31 ratings
Theme 1009th 2.917 average from 32 ratings
Graphics 959th 2.717 average from 32 ratings
Audio 554th 3.017 average from 32 ratings
Humor 846th 2.448 average from 31 ratings
Mood: 266th 3.667 average from 32 ratings

Controlit

2014-01-30

For the second module in the first year of computer science at the University of Twente they make everyone create a game. No better way to make a bunch of students enthousiastic for a project in my opinion! It usually contains three parts: the game logic and UI, networking capabilities (i.e. network multiplayer), and an AI (for those who can find the time). They rotate which game you need to make every year, and in our year it was Rollit. (Other games that I've seen make an appearance since then: 4-in-a-row, 4-in-a-row 3D, and Ringgz.)

Me and my project buddy (Reycs!) managed to get all three in there. Especially our AI, while not perfect, turned out to be one of the more advanced ones.

There's nothing technically very special about this. We used Swing to program the GUI, programmed the game in a straightforward manner, used te Java standard library for networking stuff, and implemented a relatively simple minimax-AI which did a bit better than a random AI. It was a very fun project!

Crystal Junkies

2018-02-11

This game was made for Inter-Actief's fourth (am I counting correctly?) own hackathon gamejam! While I was technically part of the team, I did not fully participate in making the game. I was mainly responsible for the music, which was very interesting because I do not really have experience making music! Alas, I had the urge to try it at least once, and now I have :-) Over the weekend I also helped with a few small other (coding) things but I was mainly focusing little the time I had on the music. I was in a team together with 3 other people; Hanne Oosterhuis was responsible for the graphics and 3D models, Ruben Haasjes for the map and character animations, and Walnoot for the general gameplay.

It was a ton of fun to make the game, and if I recall correctly we didn't end up winning. We did end up in the honorable mentions because of our good game look and feel and interesting (co-op) game idea! We also got a lot of good feedback from an external party afterwards, which was a very useful and educational experience for us :-)

Custard Memory

2011-05-08

Custard Memory is a game I put together to collect some of the meme jokes my and a few of my friends were having. Together with Snake+ it's one of the first few games I saw through until the end, i.e. managed to add help menus and such to in some shape. It plays pretty clunkily; back then I had a hard time figuring out where to put all the visual elements on the screen without blowing up the GUI. I also remember having a hard time managing the state of the actual gameplay, and how to indicate who'se turn it was. I guess one should never underestimate the complexity of UI and gameplay, even for a simple game like memory!

Draadfiguur

2009-12-17

This is another one of my vague but interesting highschool projects. The story behind it is that my maths teacher at some point organised a project where everyone had to make "String art". This couldn't just be any kind of string art, but it had to be mathmatically interesting. This meant she was going to make us make bezier curves with string art. As you can see from the screenshots, these are very simple geometrical line figures which give a kind of 3D effect.

Everyone immediately went to work with string and nail, but I wasn't looking forward to working with all that string and repetitively nailing a bunch of pins in a piece of wood. So I asked if I could make a program that could draw any string art bezier figure, and with a distrusting look from my maths teacher I got a meager "yes".

After a week or two (the given time for the project) I was finished with the tech demo and showed it to my teacher. I remember that she liked it, and I got a solid eight for it. Two weeks well spent!

From the whole collection of games that I have here this is the first one where I remember that I actually had some kind of a clue about what I was doing. As you can see from the source I had no clue about coding standards, though!

Grasmaaier Madness

2008-06-01

I think this is probably the first "real" game I did, with real meaning something like a start button and score counter (or something that resembles it) included. I had no clue about how to program back then, nor did I even remotely comprehend English so I couldn't teach myself that effectively either. But I just plowed ahead, tried to mimick the screenshots from tutorials, and somehow after a few weeks of stumbling through the UI without an idea of what I was doing, I had a game!

The game itself is pretty tasteless, as is its source code, so the source and executable are only available on request. The screenshots however should give a proper impression of what the game is like.

Fun fact: even though this game was made at least 10 years ago, I got it running on Ubuntu 16.04 with Wine in under 30 minutes! Technology can be resilient sometimes. What's even funnier is that the first error I got when running it wasn't some absurd runtime or graphics error. It was an error telling me I should purchase the Pro version because the game uses particle systems! So unfortunately, licensing can be too.

Love2D Tech Demos

2016-02-01

For a short period I had an intense fascination with Lua. This fascination manifested itself through these (and a few others) Love2D tech demo's. I had always been interested in Lua before and read a few bits about it here and there. However I only found the motivation to do something with it when I stumbled upon the Love2D engine/framework. The way it allows you to prototype quick ideas combined with the simplicity and expressivity of Lua got me motivated to try out a few ideas.

However, as most of the ideas like these go, none of them stuck. Most prototypes were never finished before it lost my interest and I continued to work on something else. These two however are the most polished and interesting. They are minimal and unintuitive, but they were fun to work on. In my opinion they also illustrate two interesting key ideas in game development. First, emerging behavior (think game of life), and second, the way good looks can make a simple platformer look promising (think marketing).

If you want to know what my prototyping efforts eventually resulted in, check out "Bee Gone!" as well somewhere above.

Maze+

2012-12-01

This was originally for a school project. Back then I made an extensive write-up on the process and content of the program, which you can find here.

It's all in dutch though, so for the english who can't read it: it's basically a program that shows a bunch of maze generation algorithms and does pathfinding through them to show you the different characteristics of maze generation algorithms. Computer science at my highschool wasn't a very complicated or demanding subject, so this program and documentation for it was complete overkill, but I had a lot of fun researching different algorithms and implementations and making the final program. I cringe now when I look at the code, but at least it got me an A!

No one can stop the mutant terror

2015-03-23

This game is special. I made this during the very first Inter-Actief gamejam! Well, technically speaking it was a hackathon, but whatever. A few friends, me, and another few interested people from Inter-Actief were up for organising a gamejam, so we joined the committee and got to work! It was a very succesful evening where some very cool, varied, and interesting games were made!

Of course, since I was one of the organisers, I couldn't formally join, but that didn't stop me from making a game ;) Also, that weekend the 20th edition of The Arbitrary Gamejam took place, which also motivated to make something anyway.

I don't remember much about the development process. This edition of the arbitrary gamejam dictated you use a random name generator (in this case this one), and after a few clicks to seed the RNG properly I ended up with "No one can stop the mutant terror". It struck me as weird and unsettling, so I decided to give it a go. Obviously, I had an enormously hard time coming up with a game idea fitting the title. Looking back, I have no words for the result. Be sure to read the README.md first because while back then I thought it wasn't too complicated, I just played it and it's batshit crazy.

One last thing I also remember was that I spent most of the first third of the weekend wasting away my time by fiddling with my compiler toolchain and libraries. I had broken it a few days earlier (pro tip: don't do that) and since I used a custom library that absolutely depended on my configuration I didn't really have another option. I haven't really worked with that special snowflake in a while now and I don't really mis it, hehe.

Pong

2010-07-21

The idea for this project originated on vacation. I was in France with my family and while it was a great vacation, I experienced some periods of boredom. At some point I was talking with my sister, and we both agreed that the day would be a lot better if we had a game to play. Didn't matter how simple, just a game. Then it dawned on me. I was a programmer, I could do this. So I grabbed my laptop and sat down to make a simple pong clone.

Lack of proper internet slowed me down a lot and I didn't finish it within a day (which was my original goal), nor did I even finish it during the vacation itself. I did finish it some weeks later after we got home, but by then the period of boredom had long since ended. It still felt like a great accomplishment, though.

Sharkfest

2013-11-01

This little game I made for the SharkJam (a.k.a. Mini Ludum Dare #46). It took place on november 2nd/3rd, 2013. Me and a friend noticed we had some spare time the upcoming weekend, and I had been having an urge to try out SFML. So this jam came at the perfect time! Not sure what my plan for the game was originally, but what I do remember is that I spent more time fighting with SFML than actually designing a game. It was a fun experience however, and it showed me a glimpse of the ins and outs of the SFML framework.

Snake+

2012-12-13

Snake+ is a pet project I did for a "free part" of my computer science class at highschool. I have a pretty detailed write-up of it here, but it's all in dutch, so I'll summarise it in english (also for the lazy dutch people 😉).

It's basically your average Snake game written with SDL2. The page contains a few screenshots on how the game evolved over the course of the two weeks that I was programming on it. It has the default game rules of having to eat pips here and there, and having a "big" pip that occurs every 5 to 10 pips and gives you a score boost. As far as I can remember this is one of my first SDL2 game projects that I actually saw through until the end, if you don't count Maze+.

What I like about it the most is that it actually has the finishing touches like a pause screen, a help screen, etcetera. I remember forcing myself to sit down and make those. It didn't take very long in comparison with the actual gameplay (if I remember correctly it was just writing some text and creating a new game state - which all in all took me 30 minutes at most) but somehow it's always stuff like that that costs the most effort mentally. Maybe it's because there usually are so many of them, and in the end they start to stack up. Anyway, back then I was very proud of my work, and in some nostalgic sense I still am!

Stormnado

2015-04-14

A cool game I did for a the Arbitrary Gamejam 13! From my collection this one of my favorites. Altough the core principle is not that amazing, I think the execution is pretty solid. The game has a coherent look and feel, is short and to the point (which is never a bad thing), and the main game mechanic works well. The only thing it misses in my opinion is a bigger vocabulary of words.

For more details on how it's build, have a look at the README.md in the executable link or take a stroll through it's source! It's nicely unstructured and incomprehensible, as many a jam game :-)

Sugarcane

2015-12-13

This simple and unremarkable game has more to it than you think!

The game itself is not very impressive. You can plant stuff, when it's grown you can harvest it, and the grey block in the southwest of the island somewhat acts as a store.

The interesting part is that the game is written in JavaScript! You might not have noticed it but the program actually runs an embedded JavaScript engine (this one). If you're curious about the game logic, no problem, have a look! It's all in the scripts folder. The engine interfaces with duktape to run the main routine about 60 times per second, and the main routine written in JavaScript calls back into Duktape to do various low-level tasks (creating a window, drawing rectangles, setting the drawing color, polling for input, etc.).

What I liked the most about this project was that all the usual complexity I deal with in most of my game projects was hidden behind Duktape. All I had to do in JavaScript was call a function, and Duktape handled the rest. Of course, this came with the downside that every time I wanted to do something complicated I had to implement parts of it in the backend before I could get the frontend to work. To each his own, I guess.

I prepared the engine in a week or two, which was then put to use in Inter-Actief's very own gamejam (second edition, I think). In this edition I won the second price, not as much because my game was interesting, but because the technical aspect of the game was fascinating. I'll gladly take it!

For completeness, here are the ratings I got for the game:

Rank Category Rating
#456 Innovation 3.19
#522 Humor 2.29
#581 Graphics 2.92
#627 Fun 2.96
#644 Mood 2.74
#673 Overall 3.00
#735 Theme 3.37
Coolness 54%

TAGJam #16

2015-01-25

I started working on this game when The Arbitrary Gamejam #16 started. I didn't make enough time for the jam that weekend however, and was stuck making some homework and commuting from home to my parents and back. So unfortunately the game never made it to something worth playing. I also remember the graphics sucking up a lot of time, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for an adventure game.

While the game itself is pretty useless, I like how you can already see a few characteristics that are also visible in two of my other games, like the way navigation works (like in A Nuclear Crossroads) and the art style in general (most specifically, A Major Mystery, but some others as well).

Tic-Tac-Toe Gui

2010-01-23

I think this was one of the first games where I set out to make something more than just some user inputs and prints with C++ and SDL. I had made some moving cube demos in the past but with SDL I had only set up a few projects and tried a few demos. I didn't really understand how to make a proper AI yet so I just implemented the GUI, added a random AI, and called it a day.

The game is not very interesting; I think it's even more fun (to me at least) to just look at the source for a few minutes instead of playing it. There's just so much... Weird stuff.

Tic-Tac-Toe Text and AI

2011-12-29

Where Tic-Tac-Toe Gui was my first try at a GUI with SDL2, Tic-Tac-Toe Text and AI was my first try at implementing a simple but functional AI. I'm not entirely sure but I can't remember it clearly, but I think I did this for a school assignment as well. I don't remember what the assignment or the subject was, but in the executable folder there are two versions: an english one and a dutch one. As far as my testing goes they both seem to be exactly the same functionally speaking, except for some interface-technical differences.

I had a quick look at the AI code and I think there are a few bugs in it, but playing against it it seems to function properly. That is, you either get a tie or the AI wins. So it seems I made sure the problematic edge cases are never triggered!

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