Space Vikings is the biggest officially released game by Moon Mole Games. The game is available on Steam here.

This was the first time we went through the entire process of releasing a game on Steam. During this process we learned a lot about what goes into a successful game release.

Another aspect that I learned about during development was control rebinding, and all the pitfalls that come along with it. How do you handle different keyboard layouts? How do you handle keyboards with unknown characters on them?

Play the free demo on Itch here.

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TerraTiler2D is a visual scripting Unity extension that assists developers in the procedural generation of 2D game worlds during runtime.

TerraTiler2D makes use of a node-graph UI system to define the procedural generation of worlds, and has over 120 different nodes to help users create exactly what they envision, including 4 different noisemap generators, and 6 different tile placing algorithms. All of these nodes have extensive documentation describing their functionality and purpose available on the documentation website.

You can find TerraTiler2D on the Unity Asset store.

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Boss Rush Delivery is a linear narrative-driven boss rush game. The player is tasked with delivering an important letter to the neighbouring country of Foscoria, which is supposedly home to many monsters and other dangers!

Play the free demo on Itch here.

A big challenge for this project was narrative writing. I did not have much experience with it, but the initial drafts got decent reactions from playtesters. In the end I think we overdid the intensity of the narrative a bit, and we should have stuck to light-hearted fun and puns.

There were also 2 major challenges on the technical side of things. Controller support and language localization.
The controller support was a fun challenge, and didn't pose too many challenges in and of itself. The issues arose when we started doing language localization. How do Spanish players call the 'Left Trigger'? What about 'Spacebar'? What if they have a button on their controller that we don't have a translation for? In the end we managed to translate the game to 41 different languages using Google Translate, with a framework that could easily be re-used for future projects.

After the release of Space Vikings, and all the complexity that came with that game, we wanted to work on a more linear and predictable concept for scoping reasons.
In the end the project still took longer than expected, but this was mainly because Moon Mole Games was facing different issues. In the end we never managed to finish the full game, but we do have a public demo available online.

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Infernal Labour Union 666 was Moon Mole Games' first full-sized project.
Inspired by Vampire Survivors, we decided to create our own spin on the genre by combining it with an auto-chess teambuilding mechanic.

Play the free demo on Itch here.

A major advancement for Moon Mole Games during this project was the development of our game analytics framework.
It allows us to collect gameplay data from our players, showing us what units they use most often, at what points they most often lose their runs, how long their play sessions are, etc.
This technology was re-used for all our future projects, and it helped us a ton in figuring out what interested players the most, how we could best balance our games, and how we could increase average play times.

The game is a complete package, including progression systems, narrative, balanced gameplay, and an ending.
However, we majorly underestimated the amount of time and work it would take to bring this project from a 'complete game', to a 'publishable game'. It was simply not polished enough, and didn't have enough content.

We had already spent 6 months on this project, so we decided to just release what we had as a demo to gauge interest. If the response we got was good, we would continue to work on it and publish it to Steam. Sadly the reaction was mediocre, so we decided to cut our losses.

In the end this was a good learning experience, and it massively helped us during future concepting and scoping. We started doing market validation much earlier on, and we more clearly defined our goals for each project.

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WHACKo is my first solo developed game. All the programming, art, audio, and design is done by me.

The goal of this project was to test if I have the skills required to do solo game development as my full-time job.

Working alone requires a great deal of concentration and motivation, which I managed to keep up for the full 7 month project.

Most notably, I created all the music, sound effects, and art for the game. I had no prior experience with either of those aspects of game development, so I had to learn on the go. I learned a lot about music theory, working with a DAW, color theory, animations, and maintaining visual clarity of game objects.

Check out WHACKo on the Google Play store.

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Dream Engine is a VR game made by 7 students from SintLucas, in collaboration with VR company Enversed.

The goal of this project was to create a VR app which let visitors of the Dutch Design Week get a taste of VR in a fun and interactive way.

For this project I mainly worked on the frontend, like making sure the controls and interactions felt natural to the players, giving clear visual feedback when something important happens, and the general flow of the game.

By presenting this project at an exhibition I learned that not everyone will play your game the way you expect them to, and that you should prepare for that.

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Moon Mole Games would often do 1 or 2 week long game-jams, with the intention of getting experience with genres we hadn't worked on yet, or to develop tooling for future projects.

If reactions on the end product were good, we would consider expanding on the game to release it as a paid product.

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Tales of Ne'ark is a grid based puzzle game based around naval combat.

This game is created using our own engine, which we created during the classes prior to this project.

The engine had to be built up from scratch, so that includes rendering models from .obj files, applying lighting, calculating position and rotation using matrices, mouse raycasting, and much more.

Besides making general improvements to the engine like the ones mentioned above, we also had to make the actual game.
The two biggest gameplay related tasks for me during this project were generating the levels from .csv files, and AI and pathfinding.
For the pathfinding I applied the A* method.

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Emgarth's Arena is a two player fighting game in which each player controls a powerful wizard. The game is made by eight 2nd year students from Saxion.

For this project we were given complete freedom as to what we could make, so our only restriction was time. Within the 3 weeks we had we managed to implement 9 unique spells with unique visuals, and all the other mechanics needed for a functional game.

During this project I mainly worked on the main gameplay elements like spell hit detection, mana, respawning, etc.
I also spent a chunk of my time on UI interaction. Implementing the unique spells was a shared effort by both programmers.

This was the first project where the game needed controller support while we weren't allowed to use external libraries, which was a real eye-opener as to how valuable it is to reuse code that has already been written, albeit by someone else.

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Lantern is a relaxing VR game I made during my internship at Fantazm. I worked on it together with one other artist intern.

The goal of the project was to make a VR experience that wasn't too taxing on the player, whilst still requiring VR interaction.

VR was still in an early phase of development at the time of making this project. We were working with the very first Oculus Rift development kit.
This proved to be a substantial challenge, because the smallest spike in performance would cause the headset to lag, which in turn could cause nausea for the player.
I spent most of my time optimizing the performance of the game by utilizing object pooling, LOD filters, draw call batching, and spreading world generation out over a larger period of time to prevent lag spikes.

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