An innocent exploration game

Still Here is a mobile game that makes players feel like taking a nice morning stroll through nature. It’s an innocent exploration game for Mobile and will be released worldwide Q2 2017. The game was born from ‘Pipworld‘ an iteration of a worldbuilding project by Emiel’s Utrecht University of Arts (HKU) former classmate David Smit.

After creating Should Shoot, Emiel started exploring different monetisation strategies like free to play in his new prototypes.  When filming for Gamekings Emiel encountered David at AMAZE in Berlin where David shared his first prototypes. Both realising their projects could use some focus as well as creative input, David and Emiel decided to have 2-weekly meetings over Skype to share ideas and progress on their projects.

Fed up with Gamemaker and all of it’s quirks Emiel decided to learn how to use Unity and C# to create his next game. During this proces Emiel got more and more involved with Pipworld, which slowly evolved into ‘Still Here’.

Still here is bound to release Q2 2017 for devices. If you would like to play an early versions of the game you can request it here. To learn more about the game and it’s development please visit the blog or the official website.

Two players: one screen

Should Shoot is a competitive ‘two-players-on-one-screen’ game for mobile devices. It’s released on iOS 29th of januari in the BENELUX and will be released internationally on 24th of February 2016. It will come to Android devices sometime in 2016.

In Should Shoot: your character IS your finger, where the player taps on the screen is where its character is in the game world. There are different game modes. All of them obviously, involve player’s having to shoot something: each other (Vs. Simple Mode), a rocket (Vs. Rocket Mode) or a ball (Vs. Ball). Player’s aim their shot by pulling back their finger, opposite of where they want to shoot. Releasing your finger from the screen fires a shot. The feeling of control and accuracy allow fierce battles to take place! The single-player modes also have a competitive vibe: it mainly involves shooting either rockets (1P Rocket Mode) or balls (1P Ball Mode).

As a fan of (local) multiplayer games, I often wondered why there is nothing on a mobile phone that fuels the competitive spirit like the games we play on consoles. Most people around us carry a mobile device around with more horsepower then those that housed the games that gave us bragging rights as a teenage gamer. With Should Shoot, my mission was to create a game that allows people to compete and thus: scream, yell, laugh and smirk whenever they feel the impact of winning or losing.

     

Should Shoot is available for download in the BENELUX! For updates and more information about Should Shoot and it’s release on other platforms, follow: @Prrrpl on twitter and/or like facebook.com/prrrpl.

 

The global game jam is a yearly event where people get together to do something insanely crazy and difficult: create a game in 48 hours. In 2014 I participated in the global gamejam together with my team called ‘Gewoon Koel’. We had an incredible time creating ‘Gewoon Puinhoop’. It’s a local multiplayer game with 3 game modes. 

Gewoon Koel consisted of Jay van Hutten (coding,- UI, design), Jacqueline van Rhijn (art), Bart-Jan Bultman (coding, art) and myself (lead tech, gamedesign). Jay, Bart-jan and myself created our own prototype in the first 3 hours. We played through them all and my concept proofed to be the most fun.

The goal of the game is to kill the other characters by hitting them with a spear. The action takes place within the game world, which is as big as the screen. After throwing the spear, players can pick it back up, being vulnerable while un-armed. Players control a squid, crocodile, rooster or an orange indefinable fuzzy.. thing. None of this makes sense but it is a lot of fun!

I am incredibly proud of the fact we managed to create 3 game modes. Players can choose a game mode by picking up the object that is vital to each specific mode. For example, to start the Bee mode, one player has to grab the beehive at the start of the game. Bees will then appear on the screen and bug a player. A player can get rid of the bees by tagging another player. After 30 seconds, the player that is chased by the bees loses. It’s kind of like a game of tag, with bees. Another mode has players collecting Diamonds and Coins. After 30 seconds, the player that collected the most loot wins the game.

In order to play Gewoon Puinhoop, you need the Windows operating system, at least 2 controllers and 4 human beings. Download Gewoon Puinhoop.

 

Tafelmonsters! is an app for iOS I created for Malmberg when working for IJsfontein Interactive. The objective was to create an app that would facilitate memorising multiplication tables. The game was created in a month by myself together with Tim Groeneboom (programmer).

In Tafelmonsters! Players have to feed a candy to an approaching monster. The monster is hungry for a candy that has the solution to the multiplication sum that he is calling for. Players can drag or swipe to throw the candy with the solution after they selected the solution from the number bar above the candy. For this App, I came up with the concept, UI and game-design. I also monitored a play-test which helped us to create the user-interface inserting the right answers on the candy.

During the play-test, I found out kids don’t have any knowledge of a conventional input interface like a calculator. Therefore, some kids insert 7 and then 1 when they want to enter 17 since the dutch pronunciation is ‘seven-teen’.  To allow kids to handle the input that way, we enabled them to insert singles first and decimals later OR vice versa.

      

 

The app was released in 2012, although it is still prominently used to this date. It also was also selected ‘Best Educational App’ by Volkskrant (Dutch newspaper) and eduapp.nl.

You can download it from the iOS App Store.