Continuing the tradition of remastering my old games and releasing them on Steam, I turned my attention to Minimal Raider, a gamejam project that aimed to recreate the feeling of the old Tomb Raider games. I’ve always wanted to expand on it with new locations, but first I had to fix the state it was in. The climbing system had some annoyances, the graphics never really made it past low-poly pseudo-greybox, and the architecture was not ready to support multiple levels, so I rebuilt the game from the ground up in Unity 6 to improve both the look and the feel of the experience.
Those of you who have followed along for years may remember that back in 2009, I created a small point-and-click Western moodpiece called Coyote. Recently I returned to it to port it to Unity, polish it up, and release it on Steam. What seemed like a simple remaster turned into a bit of a passion project that adds new graphics, voiceacting, expanded interaction possibilities, rewritten story, and even a whole new scene.
All this to say I’m proud to present Coyote: A Wild West Vignette, now available on Steam and Itch!
My Steam Review tells me I touched 122 GAMES IN 2023*, so to make sense of it all I’m breaking down my highlights of the year and seeing what they tell me about myself. And finally, we’ll look at what my contributions were to the field.
(*Not all of these came out in 2023 but I played them in 2023)
Last month I visited INDIGO, the leading dutch games event. In previous years I had attended as a visitor (though one year I did exhibit with a demo of Black Feather Forest), but this year I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone and get a business ticket. This meant I could take meetings with publishers, investors, and PR and co-development companies. And that turned out the be a great decision.
Overall the pitching went very well, and it was great to be able to demo the game on my Steam Deck right there at the table. This was the prototype I showed you some screenshots of last time we spoke; I’ve polished it up in the meantime with new features, and 3D assets to give an indication of the visual style. it’s hardly ‘finished’ but it gives a good impression of the gameplay loop.
Meanwhile, I asked a friend of mine who studied art history to curate an exhibit for this first level. She pulled existing works out of Open Access databases from museums around the world, and adding these works immediately makes the museum space come alive.
What’s next?
There’s a long list of things I want to work on after this, but for the next few months I still remain focused on work for hire assignments, and my kid of course! Towards the end of the year I hope to transition back into working on Project Art Thief fulltime.
What else?
Last week GYLT was released on Steam. It immediately caught my eye because it seems to be doing a similar thing to Project Art Thief: taking a gritty realistic genre and giving it a wholesome stylized treatment – in their case, survival horror. It’s very charming and doesn’t do a half-bad job at tackling stealth as well. Nice to see more of such projects appearing.
I’m getting more into traditional art now that I’m working on a game about museums, so I felt compelled to do a still life of my view this morning. Laying in bed with my dogs, home alone, I was struck by the beautiful lighting and how it bounced across the room. I’m a massive lighting nerd when it comes to realtime graphics, so I can appreciate some excellent global illumination like this, but instead of putting my render engine to work to recreate it, I decided to paint it.
It reminds me of one of my favorite paintings and certainly my favorite still life that I did, which is this one, of the backdoor in my parental home:
Finally found some time to draw! I was going to do a more realistic portrait, but when I sketched out the silhouette for this one I kinda liked the grungy impressionistic vibe, so I went with it.
Hey there! In the Hedgefield Quarterly Review I look back at the work I did in the past three months, both as a diary for myself and a way to consistently update you on what I’m up to. I talk project details, achievements, and the highs and lows of self-employment. Come follow along!
Better late than never! Last year really flew by, and it felt like it was all about one project, but looking back, I did quite a few thing, so it’s good that I’m writing this recap. Let’s dive in.
Hey there! Last time I told you about my new game Project Art Thief, and shared some work in progress shots from the prototype. Since then, I’ve been working with a 3D artist to replace some of the grey boxes with more pleasant things to look at. It’s by no means finished, but I’m pleased to present the main character: Robin “Birdie” Van Rijn!
I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time designing a character for one of my own games, but I wanted this one to be just right, and it was important to document it in great detail because the 2D design had to be interpreted by a 3D artist.
Birdie’s 3D model was made by Renske Peeters Weem, I painted the texture, and I’m very pleased with the result. It’s great to see her in motion, running and sneaking around the level, but more about that next time.
In the meantime I’m working more on the guard AI, level design, and the narrative together with my writing intern Lauren (not to be confused with Laura, who is an art historian friend curating an exhibit for the demo level).
Lots of exciting things, but lots to do still, too!
In other news
Which brings me to this next part, because progress is slow, but that has a very nice reason: we became parents in September! Our boy Lucas is doing very well, but also demands a lot of attention, so in a way I’m working on two big projects right now!
That’s all for this one, folks. Speak to you soon.
Project Art Thief (PAT) is a third-person stealth game where you’ll get to wander around the beautiful museums of a european city, map their weak spots, and sneak in and out unseen to replace pieces of art.
“Replace”? Yes. You see, you’ve discovered that your late grandma was an art forger! In an effort to save your family name, you decide to swap back the real works she stole with the forgeries she left hanging in the museums. Whether grandma’s ghost has something to say about that remains to be seen…
Inspired by some of my favorite stealth games like Hitman and Splinter Cell, I wanted to take a more lighthearted, non-violent route, and explore a different side of the genre that is typically headlined by bearded soldier men.
I’m currently developing the prototype for PAT with funding from the Creative Industries Fund, which I’m very excited about! Currently it’s all gray boxes while I work on the gameplay, but I’ll have more to share soon.
Here are a few shots from development:
As I said, I’ll have more to show later this year. I’m also working on a proper website and presskit and everything, so I’ll let you know when all of that will start appearing,
I’ve been thinking about my drawing style again lately.
I’ve had a fairly recognizable black and white ligne-claire style for a long time, and it’s still my go-to style when I sketch something out quickly. But for the longest time I wanted to get good at color. Dimme McWood taught me a lot about silhouettes and color harmonies, and the past few years I’ve been experimenting with it a lot more as you may have seen.
I think it goes hand in hand with my gamedev skills improving, to where I can simulate the real world a lot more accurately. And so I’ve been doing that in my 2D work as well, getting more detailed and working with light and shadow a lot more. But that style, it doesn’t really feel like me yet. In particular, sometimes it looks like a photo at a glance. So I’m experimenting with ways to bring these two things back together, and in doing so, finding a sort of recognizable cohesion that binds my work together again.
Today I feel like I got a step closer to that while working on this image. I started with color shapes, added detailed lighting but avoided blending it too much, kept the face details abstract, and at the very end added the outlines, and I like this a lot more than what I’ve been making lately. So I’m going to keep ‘driving down this road’!
When I released my fist Steam game, I wanted to add cloud save support, so you’d be able to pick up the game and continue playing on any platform. Googling for how-to guides only turned up forum posts from gamers talking about it from a user perspective, and most of the Steamworks guides I watched on Youtube glossed over this feature. Eventually I did find the cloud save section in the Steamworks documentation (shoulda looked at that first maybe, huh), but still, like most things about Steamworks, their explanation was a bit more complicated than I feel like it needs to be.
I should take a week off more often I think, I’m well in the mood to draw again! I wanted to do a portrait painting exercise for capturing a likeness and rendering it realistically, without losing myself in too much blending and detail work. So I only used my default brush that I otherwise use for linework.
Dit weekend was ik in @paradisoadam voor @son.mieux. Eerste show weer sinds Het Grote Gedoe, en het was euforisch. Mensen gingen los, Camiel brak z’n voet, Tim Hofman stond erbij en keek ernaar, het was een hele happening. Maar ook Amsterdam lag er prachtig bij op deze lenteavond, en het herinnerde me weer aan alle mooie dingen die we de afgelopen jaren niet of nauwelijks hebben mogen beleven. Het was een lange droogte, hoog tijd om weer eens een slokje te nemen.
Deze metafoor met dank aan Maud, die ergens halverwege de avond afdaalde in de gekleurde mist die op het podium hing om een drankje te pakken. De belichting was precies fantastisch, en dat zijn het soort momenten dat ik denk “tering dit zou een toffe illustratie zijn”. Helaas had ik geen camera paraat, dus heb ik getracht het vanuit geheugen te reproduceren.
I was really curious about Unity’s new input system. Abstracting player inputs from all different platforms and devices into a single actions set is really smart – I mean, I’ve been working like that for years thanks to the Rewired plugin, it’s great. So it’s exciting that Unity now has a native way to achieve the same. But the big difference is that while Rewired makes it stupidly easy, the new Input system (seemingly) does not. It CAN, but Unity’s documentation is bad at explaining this, and frankly so are most of the tutorials I’ve watched or read, which is why I’m writing this quick guide.
For the purpose of this guide I’m going to assume you have some basic knowledge of the input system, like how to install it and create an Input Action asset. If not, this is one of the nicer tutorials I’ve seen so far to get up to speed (you’d only need to watch the first 6 minutes).
The House On Holland Hill is a 15-20 minute first-person narrative game in which you play a food delivery guy. Through a series of vignettes, you cross paths with the residents of a beautiful house on Holland Hill road, where you make frequent deliveries. In the wake of tragedy, something ominous looms behind their front door.
This project started as a gamejam game a couple of years ago. I had to cut some ideas to make that deadline, and afterwards it didn’t seem useful to keep tinkering away at this perfectly playable little game, so I carried on making new games. But the project stuck with me, and from what I hear, many of you felt the same. Fast-forward a few years, and I had learned a lot about Unity and game development in general, and when I replayed THOHH I felt a strong urge to give it some love. Alongside that, I also tackled a new frontier: releasing a game on Steam.
Here are a number of highlights from the changelog:
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the light of the setting sun catch the golden adornments on her evening gown. When I looked up, she paused and looked back at me from across the room. For a moment we remained motionless; only her curls swayed softly in the breeze that blew through the marble arches we stood under.
Where did she come from? What was she doing here this late?
These questions remained unanswered, as with a graceful flutter she disappeared back into the shadows. The faint patter of her bare feet on the granite floor echoed away into the unseen.
I don’t think I ever considered finding out where she went; it felt like she had a divine purpose, and I was merely a silent observer. I returned to what I was doing: mopping the floor.”
Some #sundaydrawing. In a way she did appear out of nowhere when I started with a blank canvas. As did this little accompanying story I wrote. I’m not sure why, I guess it felt wrong posting this without a good caption to go along with it ?
Honestly, for me the best part of being my own boss isn’t the financial independence, or that I get to choose which projects I work on, it’s the fact that I get to take my dogs on a midday walk. When I first started working from home, that felt like such freedom. There are great nature preserves around here, and on a day like today, nothing beats that.
This has been an incredible year for videogames. I don’t know if it was the pandemic, or the high of my career move, or what, but something about the games this year hit different. I guess it’s been a while since I really got lost in a game. The kind where you play it every day, and think about it when you’re not playing.
You may ask “why a top 8? Why not 3 or 5 or 10?” Well, because these are the games that came to my mind as GOTY contenders; the rest was fine.
#8 Hitman 3
An extremely strong start to the year. I may have mentioned before that the Hitman series is one of my all-time faves (together with the other two pillars of the Eidos Trinity: Tomb Raider and Deus Ex). I love immersive sims in general, but there’s something to the layout and rhythmn of a Hitman level that makes me want to spend hours and hours in them, finding every secret and attempting every challenge.
So it’s almost a crime this one is in last place here. But to be fair, it’s part three. It’s more of the same. More of what I love, and the undeniably refined pinnacle of this trilogy, but it’s more of the same. But hoo boy that Berlin level was awesome.
Hey there! In the Hedgefield Quarterly Review I look back at the work I did in the past three months, both as a diary for myself and a way to consistently update you on what I’m up to. I talk project details, achievements, and the highs and lows of self-employment. Come follow along!
The last quarter of the year is usually a busy one, so let’s get right into it.
At Immer we were working hard on new update. 1.8 added support for images, tables, and footnotes, but I mostly concerned myself with redesigning the colors for the reader. But this was just a step-up to 1.9, which featured an entirely new discovery section with lists and search. This was my focus the past few weeks, and it makes it so much easier to browse the thousands of new books available with this version.
Dutch 1.9 product launch video
In other work-for-hire news, I helped Recharge draw the speakers of a weeklong event and the key takeaways from their talks. I was also contacted by a public speaker whose portrait I drew years ago at another conference to design a t-shirt for his brand. I’ve never dealt with clothing before, so this was a fun adventure. We went back and forth to design the layout, it’s an intricate tapestry of all kinds of elements from his talks and social media presence. Putting it together was quite a puzzle, but it turned out pretty cool I think!
The design, and him wearing it in one of his videos
Meanwhile, I went down a rabbit hole on 3D foliage optimization in my game Wanderwoods. Rendering a large forest is not easy on the ol’ graphics card, it turns out. I set up the Vegetation Engine plugin paired with Amplify Imposters to really go to town on batching and simplifying the tree meshes. It was easier than I expected, though still a lot of busywork, but the result is very good; Trees look fine from a distance, lighting still works well on them, but performance is dramatically improved.
I also continued chipping away at my new game prototype. I don’t know if I mentioned the concept previously, but it’s a third-person art thief stealth game. It’s been fun to add new features like throwing objects and more, but in the back of my mind I started seeing some obstacles, 3D art being the foremost. Greyboxing is well and good for this phase, but at some point this thing is going to need to look better in order to pitch it to publishers. And I’m no star at 3D modelling, nor do I have the funds currently to hire someone. Plus, managing all aspects of the development process started to feel a bit overwhelming. So all in all things were taking longer than I’d like.
At this time I came across a job opening for another indie game on Twitter. It was a temporary remote contract on a beautiful little first-person exploration game, and I thought this might be perfect to get more experience working in a small team on a similarly-scoped game. I wondered whether this was a smart preparation step before tackling my own project, or whether I was running from it, but I chose to go with the former explanation.
I had a nice interview, but unfortunately they went with someone else in the end. During the interview I showed an old game of mine, The House On Holland Hill, which was the closest in style and mechanics to what they were building. But when I replayed that game, it felt dated. It looked pretty basic, performance wasn’t great, I wasn’t too happy with it. This is still my favorite project, and the most complete ‘game’ that I have out there.
So, I made a decision to remaster the game. I had learned a lot in the meantime, and decided to apply it. Of course, this opened up a can of worms, aka my old idea archive, and the remaster kind of grew into a director’s cut kind of deal. And I figured that if I was going to put in that kind of work, I might as well take it all the way to Steam, the premier PC games marketplace. I’d previously always posted my games on itch.io because it was easy, free, and I liked the vibe of the games available there. But Steam, Steam is the big leagues. And again, I figured “this is a good preparation for your big game project”.
I expect I’ll be working on this through the end of the year, and hopefully releasing somewhere in Q1 2022. Stay tuned for more info!
Hey there! In the Hedgefield Quarterly Review I look back at the work I did in the past three months, both as a diary for myself and a way to consistently update you on what I’m up to. I talk project details, achievements, and the highs and lows of self-employment. Come follow along!
It has been three months since I quit my day job. That feels weird to say. It both feels like such a short time ago but also like it’s been ages already.
I’m not gonna lie, it feels pretty good to be totally in control of my own time again. I spent a week or two catching up on games, podcasts, movies and life stuff, and then started structuring my week around my new set of projects. It’s an on-going process, as it’s tempting to start any day working on the project I feel most inspired for at that moment, but then before I know it it’ll be friday and I’m left wondering where the time went.
Mondays I now spend at the Immer office in Utrecht so I don’t completely alienate from society in my home office. The crew there is growing already, which is fun to be a part of. We even did a photoshoot!
And it’s weird to say, but I realize now I missed the bustle of the big city. As much as I value quietness and nature, I do love the feeling of being surrounded by people with ambitions and things going on around you in every direction – something that is definitely lacking in the suburb I live in. But after each monday I am also thankful to be back home with my dogs and get to work there too. I think it’s a good balance so far.
Meanwhile I started work on the prototype for my game pitch. Whereas I’d previously been focusing on mechanics prototyping and level design, I now also had to think about backstory, scope, budget, contractors, timeline and all that. It was quite a dizzying time to be honest, there’s a lot that goes into the development of a game!
I got the chance to consult with Dan and Ben of Size Five Games (Lair Of The Clockworld God, The Swindle, etc), which I’ve been in the vicinity of since my early early gamedev days on the Adventure Game Studio forums. It was great brainstorming ideas with them, and it gave me a nice starting point for the plot and characters. And I spoke with other devs who had gone through similar things, and learned so much. Still, it dawned on me just what a boatload of work is still ahead of me to get to a good pitch package!
One line of code at a time I guess…
I did a quick sketch for the potential key art of the game, and next quarter I definitely want to start doing more concept art and graphics work. That is the biggest unknown at this point I’d say. I have faith that the idea and the mechanics and the AI and the level design will get there, 3D art is the next frontier.
On other fronts the work is keeping up as well. My reliable connection in Amsterdam is supplying me with a drip-feed of small illustration assignments, I’m helping an old client with the branding graphics on their website, and I have a few more things lined up for the coming quarter. Altogether I’m pleasantly surprised by how well the transition is going, and that I get to make a good living working on these interesting projects. I hope this can be my life for a good while now.
Hey there! In the Hedgefield Quarterly Review I look back at the work I did in the past three months, both as a diary for myself and a way to consistently update you on what I’m up to. I talk project details, achievements, and the highs and lows of self-employment. Come follow along!
At the start of the month I wrapped up work on the second book from The Recharge Company. They’ve been a longtime client, and this time they bundled all their wisdom to help you get the most out of life. I drew a series of more abstract illustrations and mental models to make the book more visually pleasing to read through.
I was also asked to make another animation for Contronics Dry Misting, which you may remember I created an elaborate animation for last year. This year was their 40th anniversary, and this time they commissioned a motion-graphics-esque video to celebrate their accomplishments.
It wasn’t a style I had worked a lot in before, and the deadline was tight, so I was a little worried, but in the end I managed to bang this thing out in about three or four days, surprising even myself. Pretty pleased with the result!
And for the final project in the work-for-hire category, a local marketing agency asked me to create some comic pages to promote a shoe brand. The scripts were prepared for me, so I could do what I do best and create some cool page layouts and linework. At least, I thought so, turns out the client was too smitten with the tight vector style of the concept mockup made by the agency, and that’s not a style that suits me particularly well. So unfortunately after trying a bunch of designs I had to pass on that one, but hey, that also happens sometimes. I knew drawing honest-to-god comic pages for an ad agency was too good to be true 😉
And of course work for app startup Immer continued as well. We shipped an update that adds reminders, and next quarter there will be a long-awaited update that adds discovery and search, along with a bunch more books, something I’m personally very excited about.
So I think it’s safe to say business is good. And while all of that is fantastic, it was also eating time away from the further development of my game idea that I mentioned last time. And from what time I could put in, I started to get the idea that this was going to be a big undertaking. Like applying-for-funding-and-assembling-a-team big. And then there’s my part-time day job too! So I had to make a decision that I’ve been considering, pondering, and putting off for quite some time now.
I quit my job.
I’ve spent more than five great years doing UX design and branding for Yoast, and it’s been a wonderful safe haven, but faced with all the possibilities in front of me currently, I had to admit that SEO just isn’t where my passion lies. I enjoyed solving the design puzzles it threw at me, and it taught me a ton, but I have no ambition to dive further into that world and master that product or domain. So it was time to move on.
That was a scary decision! And I’m going to miss having my co-designers to bounce around ideas with, but getting to spend more time with the projects I love is already giving me much renewed energy. I look forward to the months to come, getting settled into this crazy new routine, and I’ll take you along for the ride!
Hey there! In the Hedgefield Quarterly Review I look back at the work I did in the past three months, both as a diary for myself and a way to consistently update you on what I’m up to. I talk project details, achievements, and the highs and lows of self-employment. Come follow along!
The first quarter of 2021 sure was a wild one! I started off by releasing a small game called WanderWoods….
It’s a celebration of all the chill forest walks I’ve been on since the pandemic started. And in turn it made the walks more fun, because each time I’d spot something new that I wanted to add to the game.
I used procedural generation with a few rulesets to generate the forest, but it’s real difficult to fully approximate the wild and random growth of nature with just that. So I’m looking forward to using an upcoming plugin that lets me hand paint details into the procedural environment. Until then I think I have to call this thing finished.
Wireframing a new Immer experience
This year I’m also continuing work on the Immer app. The first version of this reading app my friends are making is live in the dutch App Store, and now we’re looking to the future. I’ve been prototyping some new features and a bunch of UI interactions while the others focus on the next round of investments, so that hopefully next quarter we can go full steam on the next update.
In the meantime I was also asked to be a WordPress release lead for version 5.7. This meant I had to wrangle all the design issues planned for this release and make sure they all got the attention they needed in a timely manner. I’ve been part of the WordPress design team for a few years now but I’d never been actively involved in a release cycle. Luckily 5.7 was a relatively small release so it was a nice opportunity to dip my toe in. I wrote about my experiences on the Yoast blog and I wrote a guide in the WordPress Handbook for others wanting to try the same thing.
Then something started happening. Different ideas and plans and opportunities came together in a way that I had to take notice.
It started with something completely unrelated. I was walking my dogs in the town I grew up in when I ran into an older man. He also had a dog, which usually means: make some awkward smalltalk while our dogs sniff eachother. But his first question caught me off-guard:
“Are you from around here?”, he asked with earnest interest. Probably because he seemed to know just about everybody in the town center, which I noticed during the next half hour that we stood there talking. I explained that I was originally from here but had moved away long ago. He, on the other hand, had just moved back here after ten years in Spain, and now runs his own translation company from his monumental house in the town center. We proceeded to discuss travel, careers, and our life stories.
He asked me “would you ever want to go back to doing your own thing?” “Sure,” I replied, “I mean I make a good living now with decent assignments, but…” and he nodded in agreement, getting what I was referring to; “Yeah, that desire never leaves you, huh.” I felt understood.
Some weeks later I came across an online course about gamedev that wasn’t only about making a game – I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on that now – but also about the business and marketing aspects, things I generally shy away from. I do fine releasing small games on itch, but I came up with several projects over the years that got too big for me to execute alone, or in my free time only. And of course the prestige of having a game up on Steam sounds pretty good.
Anyway, I dug into that course and found myself getting excited again about the possibilities. I drafted a list of the prototypes I have worked on in the last few years and together with some dev friends judged which one was the most viable. Out of that came a pretty cool and wild idea that I want to seriously develop and think could be a hit. Everyone I talk to about it gets excited too, so I feel like this is the time to act on it.
As a sort of self-affirmation I finally added my company to the Dutch Game Industry Directory, and registered a Steam developer account. That felt pretty good.
Now to work on the project pitch… more on that next time.
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