I worked with Roofkat on a yet unannounced game project. The game is not to be expected to go in production soon; my task was to create two mockups showing what the finished game could look like. These mockups could eventually help pitch the game to a publisher.
The turnaround time of this project was only four weeks; it involved a lot of quick decision-making. Despite this short amount of time, we were able to explore quite some ideas and solidify a possible style for the game.
My submission for January’s Character Design Challenge on Facebook. The theme was cormorant fishing, a traditional fishing method in China and Japan using trained cormorants. A snare around their neck prevents them from swallowing too large fish, enabling the fisher to snatch them from the bird.
For this challenge I imagined a cormorant shaman, going out on the river to thank the river spirits for today’s good catch.
At Abbey Games I had the opportunity to work on the last DLC for Renowned Explorers. This became The Quest for the Holy Grail, an Indiana Jones themed expansion set in the Middle-East. I worked on character portraits and animations, but also event illustrations and some props for an unused arena.
The Quest for the Holy Grail was released on 13th December 2018 as a free expansion to whoever who already owned the Renowned Explorers: International Society base game.
During my internship at Abbey Games I mainly worked on their upcoming game Godhood. In this game, players create their own religion through commanding the people’s virtues and vices. The people are inspired to construct temples, and prepare disciples to convert unbelievers in special battle rituals. The gameplay is similar to sports management games, with automatic battles and training disciples for those battles.
The game was not yet in production, so my work mainly consisted of creating sketches and idea iteration, as well as creating test assets. A lot of the work shown on this page has been changed since and is not present in the final game.
I was asked to design various buildings in the game, such as the temples used as training grounds for the disciples. The gameplay changed a lot around these training facilities; in the beginning each stat had it’s own temple design, whereas later players could choose which stat they wanted to dedicate a temple to.
As a test, we decided to take one of our shrine designs to a final level of polish to get familiar with the asset production pipeline. Creating a final asset in Abbey’s game engine involved creating multiple images per asset: each object has a diffuse, normal and hight map layer which gives the 2D assets a distinctive 3D feel.
Disciples and villagers need a place to sleep, too. So we designed houses for them, which they would build themselves instead of the player. We also came up with the idea that villagers would build places of entertainment according to the virtues of your religion. In a religion of love, for example, brothels might appear between the villager houses.
At the end of my internship I worked on a new pass of nature assets. We researched tropical rainforest vegetation as well as how to create good-looking normal maps for round, organic shapes.
Note that not all assets in these screenshots are made by me, only the ones in the first image. Apart from actual vegetation assets, we also experimented with the texture of the ground plane.
More information about the game Godhood can be found on Steam. The game was announced to enter Early Acces in July 2019 and is fully released as of 11 August 2020.
My submission for May’s Character Design Challenge on Facebook. The brief for this month was to redesign a character from the Neverending Story, so I decided to go for the Childlike Empress. I reimagined her as a mermaid princess, waiting on her deep sea throne for Atreyu to arrive.
My illustration was awarded a special mention that month.
Aurora Trail is a puzzle adventure game wherein you play as much as the wooden golem Holt as the camera surrounding him. On Holt’s way out of the temple of his creator, you have to lead him along puzzles and obstacles. But, as soon as one of your body parts overlaps with a pattern with the same color, you’ll lose it!
The full version of the game has been released on January 24th, 2018 and can be downloaded for free on Steam. During this project, I was responsible for various concept art and promotional illustrations, as well as some 3D models.
The Harpy, a monstrous woman-bird hybrid hailing from Greek mythology, was a symbol of death and pollution. Like many other female monsters, she represented a fear of anything unknown and dangerous in nature where Man had no control of.
She used to be something different, though. In ancient times, different peoples worshipped bird-goddesses that represented birth and life as well as death and rebirth. It is thought that with the arrival of large-scale agriculture, society became more patriarchal and the bird-woman was banished to the Underworld.
But not only the bird-goddesses changed, humankind changed too: we psychologically distanced ourselves from the natural world. Instead of living in collaboration with nature, we took the reins ourselves and sought control over our food production and living space.
In HARPYA, I strived to bring back the life-giving aspects of the harpy through character design for video games. Using Jung’s female psychological archetypes as a guide, I created seven new harpies being protectors of nature, each embodying a different aspect of our relationship with nature.
I made this illustration for a fanzine focusing on childhood interests and obsessions. When I was young I was a fan of the Digimon anime and the episode wherein MetalSeaDramon, WarGreymon and MetalGarurumon fight is one I remember most vividly.
Catastrophic Dinner started as an asymmetric VR game made for the Global Game Jam 2019 I made with Joeri van der Velden, Pim Rutten, and Sander Verbeek.
In Catastrophic Dinner, the VR player is trying to make his apartment ready for a romantic dinner with his girlfriend. His cats, the non-VR players, try to turn the date into a disaster by throwing plates from the table and turning the lights off.
Being the only artist on the team and not very experienced in creating 3D models, we decided to depend heavily on free asset packs found in the Unity Store. Where these packs didn’t offer what we needed, I created new assets in the same style, such as the cat towers and the wine rack. Naturally I also did the UI and the title and end screens.
We received quite some positive feedback on our game, so we decided to continue development. We wanted to add more levels with different situations the cats could mess up, and thought of different types of cats to choose from to play with.
Sadly, the project came to an halt in August 2019, partly due lost interest and the extremely small niece there is for asymmetric VR games.