Game development

Project Art Thief (working title) is a cozy non-violent stealth game. You'll get to wander around beautiful museums and galleries in 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.

• This game is in the prototyping phase

• Visit the teaser website

"Fantastic."
"Really confident and effective storytelling."
"I felt a palpable sense of growing unease throughout."

THOHH is a first-person exploration game made in two weeks for the Idle Thumbs gamejam. You play as pizza delivery guy Luigi, and through a series of vignettes you experience the story of the house on Holland Hill and its residents, where Luigi made frequent deliveries.

• Get The House On Holland Hill on Steam
• Get The House On Holland Hill on itch.io

Coyote: An Old West Vignette is a tiny point-and-click adventure game about a gruff marshall on the trail of a deadly outlaw.

First created in 2011 using AGS, I ported it to Unity and polished it up years later. It's above all a tonepiece, with full voiceacting and cinematic camera angles. There are several ways to progress through the short (linear) story, where the player input mainly serves to shape how the player character reflects on the events. It also tries to take a different approach to the cool untouchable cowboy sterotype.

• Get Coyote on Steam
• Get Coyote on itch.io

"The visual style is wonderful, the climbing is fluid and feels great, and the level design is also rad. Very impressed with how much you nailed the feel."

Minimal Raider is my homage to the Tomb Raider franchise for the #tombraiderjam, and also my first fully 3D game. It's roughly of the scope of a challenge tomb from one of the modern games, and it focuses on exploration like the old games did. But watch out for the deadly traps and challenges that can be found throughout... only a skilled adventurer will be able to make it out alive with the treasure.

• Play Minimal Raider

WanderWoods is an interactive nature experience. Take a relaxing walk, explore deep into the brush, or ride a horse down the many paths of this procedurally generated forest.

During the covid-19 pandemic I spent a lot of time walking my dogs in the forest near my house. I saw it change at different hours of the day and throughout the seasons. There was comfort in walking familiar paths, excitement in finding new ones. It was an experience I knew I had to do something with. WanderWoods is my humble attempt at replicating that.

• Play Wanderwoods

A 2D sidescrolling exploration game about an Irish lighthouse keeper who comes across the MV Lyubov Orlova, a russian ghost ship that has been adrift for several years. In 2014 its radio blipped off the coast of Ireland, and later disappeared again. This game is an exploration of what could have happened if someone encountered the ship during that time.

I made the prototype for this game thanks to dutch radio show Opium. They invite one artist every week to work on a passion project in their office, so I decided to pull this story out of my idea box and build the base game from scratch in one week.

• Development of this game is on hold

Black Feather Forest is a 2D adventure game inspired by true events and Haida mythology, aswell as things like True Detective, Fargo, Bright Falls, Kentucky Route Zero, Puzzle Agent and Detective Grimoire.

You play as Sofia, a documentary maker, and together with your cameraman Caleb you travel to the town of Augier’s Peak, up in the wilderness of rural Canada, where three people have gone missing recently.

You are free to travel around town, where you will meet a handful of inhabitants that all have their own reasons to help you discover what happened - or not. You gather clues by talking to people and combining pieces of evidence and statements to slowly try to figure out who or what is behind all this.

• Development of this game is on hold

• Play the prototype

In Reconquista you play as an Incan rebel coming to reclaim a sacred artifact from the conquistador-occupied island of Huaca, off the coast of South America.

Reconquista is a narrative first-person exploration game. It is the first 3D game I've made, and thus I have relied heavily on the Unity Asset Store.

In 2021 I made an update to the visuals using what I learned since the initial release.

• Play Reconquista

Free Birds is a location-based game/chatbot which I helped design together with Hubbub and Anticlimax for the Dutch Museums Association.

The game puts players in touch with Katia, a journalist writing articles about increasing sociopolitical tensions in her country. Through a chat interface she asks the player for advice in moral dilemmas, for which she refers to similar situations featured in the museum the player is visiting. This location-awareness is done via iBeacons.

I helped Hubbub create the visual style for the game and hooked up parts of the UI in Unity. It was a very interesting project and a great collaboration, giving me a chance to work on storytelling in a different way and create something engaging for a young audience.

The game is currently playable at the Airborne Museum in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands.

• Get Free Birds from the App Store

Cinekid 2014

Dutch Game Awards 2014

Best of App Store 2014 pick China

Bounden is a mobile dancing game, a mix of Twister and ballet. It was created by my buddies at Game Oven in association with the Dutch National Ballet, and I was brought in to design the visual style.

To perform a 'dance', two people hold onto the phone and follow markers arranged around a spherical world. By rotating the phone you change your viewpoint - like a sattelite looking down at earth - so you can follow the path of the markers. And from these movements, a choreography emerges. It's hard to describe, but seeing it in action is really fun.

Designing the worlds was a nice challenge in abstract art, telling a story with shapes and colors. You can watch the development diary videos on the website to hear more about what that involved.

• Visit the website

2012 IGF Nuovo Award nominee

2012 WWDC Design Award nominee

2012 DGA Game Design Award nominee

Fingle is a cooperative two-player iPad game about the thrills of 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 groovy 70's kind of style.

• Get Fingle from the App Store

Popular webcomic Looking for Group - itself inspired by countless fantasy RPGs like World of Warcraft - wanted to turn their property into a game, and the pitch I wrote made them choose my former employer Paladin Studios for the job.

Fork of Truth was supposed to be a classic isometric hack-and-slash co-op dungeon crawler RPG built in Unity. It was intended that you play with up to four friends as the iconic main characters and explore the world of LFG. The project ultimately got put on the shelf for lack of funding.

Aside from the initial pitch that won us the project, I wrote the subsequent game design document containing the features, structure and abilities, built several prototypes, did gameplay balancing, visual effects design, trailer editing and more.

• Read about the design process
• Watch the trailer

Trusted Soil is a classic adventure game set in the future, which 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.

For the demo we completed as part of our graduation project I created all the graphics and animations, designed a custom dialogue system and wrote part of the narrative.

The full version is currently in development by the writer and co-creator Anne Bras.

• Play the demo
• Visit the website

Winner April 2011 MAGS competition

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...

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.

• Play 15 Minutes
• Read the devblog

Future of Health Award 2012 nominee

I was hired as the game designer on this 2D adventure game commissioned by a Dutch healthcare institute. They had the ambitious plan to create a game that could support the rehabilitation process of their patients - mostly people with symptoms of chronic pain or fatigue.

While not religious in nature, Laka has roots in buddhist philosophy. By playing the game, the patients practice mindfulness and are made to think about how they approach life - each situation in the game has several possible outcomes. The game also doubles as a playful way to fill in the institute's intake form.

• Laka was only available for patients at Ciran

• Read the university research paper about Laka

TijdTripper is a casual adventure game I worked on during my internship at Monkeybizniz.

In this absurd adventure, the main character timetravels through thousands of years of Utrecht's history trying to recreate events that were instrumental for its legacy. It was developed for the historical archive Utrechts Archief to give people a new way to interact with the history of their town.

I wrote the dialogue with assistance from Niels 't Hooft and worked on game- and level design. Plus I built the prototype you can download below.

• This game is no longer available

• View the trailer
• Play the prototype

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.

• This game was cancelled

• Read the postmortem