Joris Derks - Homepage

About me

I'm a front-end focussed game developer who is currently studying at HKU. (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht) From a young age I've both played and made games, starting with Minecraft plugins in Java and now my own games from scratch in mostly Unity3D.
I'm a fan of simulation games, management games & strategy games and I dream of creating and publishing my own.

Scroll down to see more about the projects I've worked on or go to my GitHub to directly see my code!

Simulations

Town building simulator

This project was made for my finals exam at Alfa-college, I made this project to learn more about Finite State Machines & town building mechanics and balancing. While developing this project I learnt a lot about letting people playtest my game, balancing and AI. This game was made in Unity and got me my diploma for MBO game development.

Tags: Game AI, OOP, C#

Apoapsis

This project was made as my test final Exam for my studies at Alfa-college, I challenged myself to make a space physics simulator where space enthousiasts who may play "Universe Sandbox2" and "Kerbal Space Program" let planets fall into eachother and launch spacecraft from said planets. By combining some of both games' features it makes for a fun and informative experience. Making this game was a huge challenge because of all the maths I was unfamiliar with, this game was made in Unity.

Tags: Physics, OOP, C#

Find out more

Games

Reus 2

Reus 2 is a game I worked on during my internship at Abbey Games . I contributed to the behaviour of the villagers, prioritisation and distribution of their tasks and making production tools for the team to improve debugging villager behaviours.

Tags: Game AI, Production Tools, Internship, Unity, C#, 2023

Steam page

Lost and not (yet) found

This is a game I made with a couple of friends at the GlobalGameJam NL in 2021. In this game you're lost on an abandoned island and the goal is to be found. There's a couple of weird structures on the island and some of them hold some mysterious secrets... Can you get off the island?

Tags: Story & Puzzle Design, Made in 48 hours, Unity, C#, 2021

GlobalGameJam page

LifeLight

LifeLight is a game where I mainly worked as lead designer and was made in my first year at HKU. In this game you play a girl whose grandmother has passed away and her ashes are now in a magic lantern. You need to come to your grandmother's favorite place to scatter her ashes without getting caught by the dark spirits.
Can you get to the end?

Tags: Narrative & Game Design

Trash Monster City Protection

This is the game I made with a couple of good friends of mine at the 2020 GlobalGameJam Groningen. In this game you're supposed to save the city by killing trash monsters and steal their trash to repair the city. You can repair houses and a couple of guards will protect them. Can you repair the entire city?

Tags: Procedural Generation, Made in 48 hours, C#

GlobalGameJam page

PETscape from Home

This project was made when I participated for the Global Game Jam 2019 in Groningen, the theme was "What home means to you", some of my good friends and I decided to make a game where the goal is to find your pet that ran away from home. After finishing the event we even won a local award for visuals! During this project I did part of the design code, design & the particle systems.

Tags: VisualFX, C#

GlobalGameJam page

Dungydougly

This project was made in commission and cooperation of Alfa-college, in this game you have to find your way through many randomly generated floors and get to the top of the dungeon, the goal of this project was to get more familiar with C++ and OpenGL. This simulation was made in the RT2D framework.

Tags: Procedural Generation, C++, OpenGL

Github project

Comicbook Hero

This game was made in commision of Alfa-college and the Dutch Comics Museum, and was made to be played by young visitors of the museum between ages 8 and 14. To make this game appealing for the children to play, you play as a small child who gets trapped inside a comic book; and needs to find its way out. The 2D sidescroller-like gameplay makes it intuitive and easy for children to play. This game was made using Unity.

Tags: Unity3D ,C#

Game playable in museum

Textadventure

This project was made in commission and cooperation of Alfa-College, in this text adventure you play as a poor miner that needs to head into the mines to earn money and heal his wounds. Text adventure was primarily made to learn more about object-oriented programming and inventory systems. Text adventure was made in Java.

Tags: OOP, Java

Github project

Topdown Shooter

This game was made in commission and cooperation of Alfa-College, the goal of the game is to survive as long as possible against the enemies that approach you. This game was primarily made to learn about Vectors. This game is made in ActionScipt (Flash).

Tags: Flash, object-oriented, ActionScript

Github project

Tools

Noise Generator Tool

This is a tool I made to make custom noise textures based on parameters, the goal of making this was not for industry professionals to actually use it but to make a foundation to build upon to achieve that goal in the future. It's completely made with MVVM and scalability in mind and already offers some simple ways of generator some basic textures. It already features things like layers and different types of blend modes.

Tags: Production Tools, WPF, DotNet, C#, MVVM

Github link