Joram Van Uffelen

Who Let Him Cook: Second Serving

Solo

Remake

Have you ever felt incompetent at cooking? Of course, who hasn't, but have you ever considered how the ingredients you used felt about being used so poorly? Well this cook certainly hasn't, and our sausage has had enough of it, he has decided to take matters into his own hands and fix this cook's atrocious cooking himself.

Created by: Van Uffelen Joram

What is Who Let Him Cook: Second Serving ?

Who Let Him Cook: Second Serving is a remake of Who Let Him Cook.

One year after the creation of Who Let Him Cook, I wanted to apply the knowledge I learnt in the past year. In Who Let Him Cook Second Serving, you play as a sausage that is preparing a meal. The local chef is terrible at his job and has no clue what he's doing. In order to save the restaurant, you must remove the unnecessary ingredients.

The game offers a total of 5 different recipes that you can complete. When you run out of cooking time, you will receive a score. This score is based on the accuracy of your creation compared to the recipe. Your high score will be saved for each level. How high can you score on each recipe?

What did I learn ?

In the past year, I learnt a lot, so I had a big list of things I could change or add to the remake.

The most important one is probably the use of the new Unity input system. I have experimented with the system a lot, but during the remake, I created a custom package with basic features. This allows me to import the package into new projects and have a working input system.

I also learnt a lot about design patterns and how to structure a Unity project. The structure of the remake is significantly better than the original. This allows me to add more features in the future more easily.

I have been spending a lot of time using the Toolkit UI system instead of the Canvas system. As someone with some HTML/CSS experience, I prefer this system over the older ones.

I used the Splines package, this was required for the chef's movement.

In the past few months, I have learnt a lot about shaders. I chose to add some shaders to increase the visual quality.

What software did I use ?

• Unity Engine
• Blender (3D assets)
• Krita (2D assets)
• Github (Version control)

Five: Space Adventure

Team

Client Work

School Assignment

“Five: Space Adventure” is a top-down endless survival game all about the dangers of blind spots. In it, you take on the role of galactic superhero “Five” on his space-bike “Rock-It” and are tasked with saving a pollution-infested planet on the brink of being uninhabitable from supervillain “Smog” and his “Milky Way Pirates”.

Created by: Bouckaert Tanguy, Fillée Jens, Vincyenzo Claes, Vanderbiesen Maarten, Van Uffelen Joram

What is Five: Space Adventure ?

Five: Space Adventure is an education game made for the company IkHighFive. We had to create a game for children between the ages of six and twelve. The game had to teach kids, in a fun way, more about traffic.

We chose to teach the children about the blind spots of trucks. In this game, the player must manoeuvre himself between a lot of trucks while going to different points. If the player is too long inside a blind spot or collides with a truck, the game will end.

What was my contribution ?

I was the lead programmer on this project. I was responsible for various mechanics in the game.

The client wanted to integrate the game into their own platform. The best way to do this was to provide the client with a WebGL build. While I had already created games for WebGL, I never designed them with the thought of playing them on a mobile device. This was very important for the client because most of the target audience played on mobile devices. The game can both be played using a keyboard and touch controls, the size and position of the user interface will also depend on the type of device on which you play the game. For example, the user interface will always stay inside the safe area of your device.

Because the game had to be playable on mobile devices, we also had to keep performance in mind. The first time we tested with some devices, the performance was very bad. I went through the whole project to improve the performance.

I designed the truck system, each truck has sensors. If a sensor is triggered, the behaviour of the truck will hange. Each sensor also has different properties, like the distance, a cooldown, a reaction event, and a detection filter.

We used a combination of the Unity Canvas system and the Toolkit UI system. I designed all the user interfaces for the Toolkit UI System. We never intended on using the Canvas system, but because I was not familiar with the system, I wasn't able to create certain user interfaces with the Toolkit UI system.

At the end of the project, I spent a lot of time polishing the mechanics of the game.

These were the biggest systems I created. Because there were two developers on the team, we designed a lot of systems together.

What did I learn ?

The most important thing I learnt during the project was working as a team for a client. While I had already worked with a team to participate in game jams, it was nothing compared to this. In this team, we each had our own tasks. In all the game jams I have participated in, I have done a lot of different kinds of tasks.

Another important thing was the fact that we had to deliver a polished game. That's something I had never done before, my submissions for game jams were playable, but they had bugs. I was shocked when I started polishing the game, it felt as if there was no end. If I polished something, I saw something else that could use some more polish. I was also shocked when I had to improve the performance, it went a lot quicker than I thought.

What software did I use ?

• Unity Engine
• Google Spreadsheets (Project Management)
• Miro (Project Management)
• Github (Version control)

Let Me Guide You

Solo

Vertical Slice

School Assigment

The world has changed! Bob, a man challenged by poor vision, finds himself unable to navigate his environment. Your mission is to guide Bob towards his destination, guaranteeing his safe passage through the shifting landscapes.

Created by: Van Uffelen Joram

What is Let Me Guide You ?

Let Me Guide You is a platformer game where you take control of a godlike figure. Your mission is to guide Bob safely to his destination. Bob is a man who is challenged by poor vision.

However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Bob is used to his routine routes with fixed reference points. Due to a shifting of the landscape, these routes no longer exist.

By placing reference points in the new landscape, Bob will follow these reference points. Your goal is to safely guide Bob towards his destination. Once the first reference point is placed, Bob will start walking. There is no stopping Bob once he starts walking. You must plot the route faster than Bob can walk the route.

What did I learn ?

Let Me Guide You is the result of my Game Design 3 course. During this course, we had to make four prototypes in a short amount of time. During each prototype, I learnt a lot about brainstorming different ideas, quickly prototyping some of these ideas, and gathering valuable player feedback.

What software did I use ?

• Unity Engine
• Blender (3D assets)
• Photoshop (2D assets)
• HacknPlan (Project management)
• Github (Version control)

Who Let Him Cook

Team

Game Jam

Programming

Have you ever felt incompetent at cooking? Of course, who hasn't, but have you ever considered how the ingredients you used felt about being used so poorly? Well this cook certainly hasn't, and our sausage has had enough of it, he has decided to take matters into his own hands and fix this cook's atrocious cooking himself.

Created by: De Waele-Van de Velde Gilles, Fillée Jens, Vanderbiesen Maarten, Van Uffelen Joram

What is Who Let Him Cook ?

Who Let Him Cook is a game developed during the GMTK Game Jam 2023.
My team and I created the game in 48 hours. This was, for most of us, the first game jam we participated in.

The theme for the game jam was "Roles Reversed".
Following some brainstorming, we came up with the concept of ingredients preparing themselves. Instead of preparing the meal, the chef provides the ingredients. However, the chef is terrible at cooking. This will result in the chef adding ingredients that are not needed.

What is my contribution ?

I spent most of the development time in Unity. I was responsible for tasks like the character controller, the chef behaviour, and the score system. In the last hours of the project, I spent a lot of time polishing and fixing bugs, after which I built and submitted the game.

What did I learn ?

This wasn't the first time I built and published a game on itch.io. But this was the first time I had to do this process within a given time. We ran into some merge conflicts while using Github, while it looked scary at first, after some research we discovered how we can deal with them and how we can prevent them. I underestimated some tasks during the development, which resulted in a feature cut or an unpolished feature. The movement of the character is a perfect example of this.

I learned a lot during those 48 hours and I enjoyed developing Who Let Him Cook with my team. After the results of the game jam, I fell in love with the idea of improving upon this game. Maybe someday I could improve Who Let Him Cook.

What software did I use ?

• Unity Engine
• Blender (3D assets)
• Photoshop (2D assets)
• Miro (Project Management)
• Github (Version control)

Timeless Mansion

Team

Graduation Assignment

My graduation project in 2022, titled 'Timeless Mansion,' involved the development of a LAMP server. The task included the creation of a dynamic website using PHP, coupled with a MySQL database.

Created by Joram Van Uffelen, Keano Engelen and Robbe Pauwels.

What is Timeless Mansion ?

Timeless Mansion is a text-based game I created together with two fellow students. The assignment consisted of creating a dynamic website. We had to read and write data from a MySQL database using PHP on an Apache server. We chose to create a text-based game where the player can save and load their current game.

What is my contribution ?

I did most of the research on how to setup an Apache server and how to read and write simple data from the database. After we completed the setup, I created the base layer of a text-based game. My fellow students expanded on top of this layer to create the needed functionality. While my fellow students were working on the story and the functionality, I created an admin panel. This panel allows the admins to read, add, edit, or delete data from the database.

What did I learn ?

During this project, I learned multiple new technologies. For example, we had to manage our project in Azure DevOps. We also had to learn PHP to communicate with the database. I used some jQuery to program some features on the webpage. At the end of the project I learned how to setup a Linux Apache MySql PHP server.

What software did I use ?

• LAMP
• Azure Devops (Version control)