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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.