Hi, I'm Stefan Vandenboorn
I am a graduate game design student at the Fontys Hogeschool in Eindhoven since February 2023. My passion lies in game design and game development. My goal is to create games that I would like to play myself. I want the players to have as much fun playing these games as I had in making them.
From 2008 I have been a member of the drum band Harmonic St. Petrus en Paulus Wolder-Maastricht. What I also like to do in my free time is watch movies & TV-shows, gaming, hanging out with friends and experiment in Unity to get better at working with Unity as well as learning and discovering new things.
My Projects
Achievement System
My goal with this achievement system was to practice more with Unity's editor scripts. I wanted to see if I could fully customize an achievement from within the Unity Editor with the help of editor scripts. This goal has been accomplished, and I am very proud of the end result.
I can select a requirement type I want the achievement to have and based on that result, I'll get to see the corresponding options. This can either be another selection option, fill in option or check option. Some of these options can have corresponding results based on what has been selected and/or checked. By doing this project I now know a lot more on how Unity editor scripts work and how I can use them for my future projects.
I've also improved my custom scriptable object Unity events based on the feedback I got from a colleague programmer from school. I now know how to make a more abstract and generic scriptable object Unity event that I can use as a base for all my different types of Unity events. Working on this project was a lot of fun, and I've learned a lot from it, even though it took some time to practice and fully understand how it all works. This is something I can also reuse for my future projects as well.
Robot Brawl
For this project I wanted to dive more into Unity's joining manager as well as the newly implemented object pooling functionality made by Unity. I've had to come up with this idea, design and develop a prototype of this game in a time span of four weeks.
The project was fun to work on and pushed me to work under pressure to get the end result I've ended up with. I'm quite proud of what I've accomplished in these four weeks and there were certain elements I would've approached differently, given I had more time.
If you're only interested about how I came up with this idea, the inspiration I took from different types of games, the character with its mechanics and the aesthetics, I suggest you take a look at my game idea document I've made for this project.
CTOUCH
CTOUCH would like to see users become aware of the energy consumption of the screen. 60% of CO2 emissions are produced during the manufacturing process. 40% of the emissions are currently caused by the end users. This project was developed to enable children aged 8 and below who use a CTOUCH Riva in primary schools to improve the energy efficiency of how their screens are used.
This was a group project where my main task was to design the UI elements for this project because of my media course background, but I also wanted to learn new programming skills as well. I've wanted to learn how to create a cinematic overview of the world for the user to interact with so that they can see up close their progress and changes while also getting more immersive with their world.
The project was a fun and interesting way of creating a game. I've got a chance to experiment with elements in Unity I never worked with before, which was a nice change of pace. I'm glad I've taken the leap out of my comfort zone to try out new things in Unity, and it helped me grow as a developer.
Jammo's Adventure
The goal with this project was to get a better understanding into how interfaces work in Unity and what the best way to implement them was. I've had a lot of fun experimenting with this, and it was a good practice for me to create cleaner code. I've wanted to recreate something I also liked to play as a kid and still do to this day, which is a fun 3D Platformer with an optional collection system. They always kept me hooked on wanting to play one more level after I just said I was done after the previous one.
This project was a fun idea that I've started and want to continue developing in my own free time to make it more unique, but still try to capture that feeling of wanting to play one more level like I had with other 3D platform games I've played as a kid and still do till this day. Unfortunately, I had a returning medical condition during this period while I was developing it, so I had to cut a lot of content I had in mind for this project. Still, I'm very proud of what I've accomplished so far with this project, and I've learned and improved a lot as a developer.
3D World Map v1
The goal of this prototype was to see if I could recreate some well known world map designs that are currently out there. The ones I've looked at for this project were Crash Bandicoot and Super Mario Bros. Both have their own way of displaying and guiding the player over the world map and I wanted to see if I could combine them into one and the same world map style.
At this point I came as far as the Crash Bandicoot style world map implementation. As for the Super Mario Bros. method, I'm still figuring out how to recreate it properly in Unity.
I've also created a tutorial on how to recreate the basic elements of a 3D world map such as unlocking levels and navigating between them.
Vietcong
The main goal of this project was to improve my coding skills from the previous project, but also try to learn something new. Even though the inconsistent pattern behavior in the previous project was quite simple, it was a good practice to figure out what worked and what needed to be improved.
Another part I wanted to improve upon was to provide visual feedback to the player. I've done this by putting exclamation marks above the projectile shooters when they were about to fire. This gave the players enough time to react and gave them a fair chance to avoid it. I have done the same thing for when the tiles that were about to get hit by displaying a rotating target on the tile that was about to get hit, as well as a shadow effect on the projectile to display how close it was to hitting the tile.
Looking back on my previous project I've improved a lot on creating an inconsistent pattern behavior as well as making everything modifiable. What I mean by that is I could adjust the amount of projectile shooters and tiles in the play area in Unity by simply adding or removing them in the hierarchy.
Hungry-hungry
For this project I was in charge of making the enemy mechanics and the environment setting where this game took place. For the enemies I had to make them follow the closest player within its range and make them spawn at one of the four sides of the map. I've made it so that there is no consistent pattern in the four spawn positions, that way the players always have to be aware of their surroundings.
This was quite a challenge for me as I've never done anything like this before, so I'm very proud of my accomplished end result. For the environment I've looked up different jungle type aesthetics to get a feeling of how a jungle looks like based on the location this mini-game would've taken place.
I'm quite happy with the end result of what I've set out to accomplish, and I've learned a lot about different methods of spawn mechanics as well as how to take inspiration from real life environments and then try to recreate that environment into a game.