Hi, I am Tim Hengeveld
a dutch illustrator & game designer
2012 IGF Awards nominee
Fingle is a cooperative two-player iPad game about the thrills of playfully encountering the touch of eachother's fingers on a multitouch device. See if the two of you have firm enough fingertips and fine enough motor skills to solve the many braintwisters and fingerbenders Fingle throws at you.
For Fingle I took care of all the visual aspects, designing backgrounds, game elements and interfaces all in a 70's groovy kind of style.
Trusted Soil is a classic adventure game with a modern twist. Set in the future, it follows teenage boyscout Thomas Wild on his search for his disappeared father and the secrets that lie behind The Black Wall that surrounds his entire homeland of Hetian.
With Trusted Soil we have tried to innovate some parts of the genre such as the dialogue system and the way in which you interact with the world around you.
For this project I created all the graphics and animations, designed a custom dialogue system and wrote part of the narrative.
Visit the official website
ConFlo is my attempt at doing something new with adventure game dialogue systems. Most of the dialogue systems we see are variations of the default list of inquiries, but in real life conversations are about much more than that.
So for my graduation project I asked myself: How can we give players a system for more natural and direct control of game conversations? To figure that out I dove into the field of linguistics to discover what true conversations are made of. ConFlo is the result. Aside from constructing responses more naturally, it also attempts to better integrate the dialogue system with the regular gameplay experience.
Below you can download two prototypes to test drive the system. They do not optimally utilize every aspect of the system yet, but they should give you a pretty good idea of the idea behind it. If you want to read more about the theory behind the system, you can also download the accompanying thesis.
Storytelling in games has long been a much-debated issue. Luckily we are finally arriving at the point where developers accept and acknowledge that blending narrative and gameplay together can create a much more powerful experience than each of the two separately.
With this paper I have attempted to uncover ways in which gameplay and narrative in interactive entertainment can be blended together in such a way that it does not take the player out of the experience.
To find the answer I have outlined some of the problems presented when trying to communicate story information to the player, some of the solutions used by modern games, the opinions of several designers, writers and directors on how best to tackle this issue, and I close out with a few case studies of games I have personally been involved in.
Read the paper
Adam Segler is an NYPD detective, and a damn good one at that. But his faith in the system is waining. Then when one day a seemingly routine backup call uncovers a sinister plot devised by an organisation shrouded in shadows, Adam gets a chance to redeem himself - and potentially save New York in the process.
The Majestic Conspiracy is a point-and-click adventure game bringing homage to the detective flicks of the 90's. It is scheduled for release in 2011.
Visit the official site.
During our final year at the HKU we were assigned to create a game for the Microsoft Surface table in the lobby of the Dutch Game Garden, which should simultaneously be entertaining and introduce the companies that reside in the building. With The Jelly Reef, we succeeded in both.
Swiping over the table creates currents in the water which help you guide the jellyfish away from harm. And by placing a physical DGG tag on the Surface, each jelly reveals the name of a company, which you can then tap on for more info.
For this project I worked mainly as an environment artist and asset pipeline curator.
Visit the official website
TijdTripper is a casual adventure game I worked on during my internship at Monkeybizniz. It was developed for Het Utrechts Archief, the historic archive of the Dutch city of Utrecht, to give people a new way to interact with the history of their town.
I wrote the dialogues, worked on game- and leveldesign and designed some of the characters. Plus I built the prototype you can download below.
I was the lead artist on this project, and was responsible for designing the playing cards and their illustrations. We tried to stay faithful to the original book illustrations by Kees de Boer while still finding ways to introduce our own aestethics into the visual style.
We are currently discussing how and when this game will become available in Dutch retail stores.
Visit the official website (Dutch)
Weathered special agent Jake Brewer is called upon once more to secure the safety of his nation. But this time he only has 15 minutes before everything goes tits-up...
Winner of the April 2011 MAGS competition
15 Minutes is a short adventure game built in one month as a loving parody to the traditions and tropes of the hit tv-show 24.
The year is 1846.
The first settlers have reached California, and the United States are at the brink of war with Mexico. These are troubled times. And in these times, people look for a hero.
What they got was an outlaw.
Are you man enough to fill his boots?