Sam van der Hoeven

Sub Nivis is a game we made in the engine "The Other Engine". The Other Engine is a custom game engine I made together with a team of 5 other programmers. We spent 6 weeks on the Engine, developing it from scratch in C++. With it you can create games for both Windows and PlayStation 4. We loaded quake maps, made in the level editor Trenchbroom. At the end of these 6 weeks we got the engine in a working state for a demo game "Eribon".

After these 6 weeks our engine was selected by our teachers to go on to the next block where our team grew to 8 programmers, 3 designers, and 2 artists. With this team we went on to create the game "Sub Nivis".

In the creation of this engine I was responsible for designing the engine with an entity component system, the collisions, the editor, and some gameplay elements like the melee attack.

We made the game together with 8 programmers, 3 designers, and 2 artists in the engine. The game is playable on both PS4 and Windows PC. You can find the itch.io page below.

Personally I worked a lot on the stability of the engine and the collisions, the melee weapon attack and animation, the PS4 setup, and the pickups.

We ended up winning the best programming award of our year.

Unfortunately, we are not allowed to share the full code because the PlayStation 4 code is protected by an NDA.

Attic Panic is a 2-4 player top-down supernatural rogue-lite shooter where you play as possessed toys that battle each other to entertain the Entity, which grants players unique powers and abilities at the end of each round.

We spent a full year on this game with a team of 5 programmers, 9 designers, and 10 artists. The game released in the summer of 2023. We received great reactions from our small community, and I personally really enjoy playing the game.

In this game I was responsible for most of the networking code, such as the hosting and joining lobbies, loading the level, and the upgrade screen.

Crazy Lily is a high-octane top-down shooter set inside a decrepit nuclear submarine. Lily, a potted planted gone sentient, has broken out of her terrarium in search of sunlight - only to find herself at the bottom of the sea, amidst mechanical ruins littered with cryptic text. Tight corridors and sharp corners emanate a menacing presence, filled to the brim with angry pufferfish hellbent on ramming Lily and turning her into a pincushion.

We worked on the game with a team of 14 people during our first year of University. We spent 6 weeks on the project and got a pretty fun game out of it.

My main responsibility was the AI, which I made using Unreal's built-in AI tools.

Steve Engine was the first custom engine I made together with two graphics programmers and one gameplay programmer.

With the engine we made a small demo game. It's a top down game where you control a wizard who attempts to reach the end of the maze while being attacked by enemies. The wizard can shoot "spells" and collect upgrades.

The engine is a static library with the engine functionality. A game can link this library and add their own gameplay code. Games can run on both Windows and PS4.

During the second block of the first year of my university course we made a raytracer that ran on the CPU. We were not allowed to use any STL, which I took as do not include any headers I did not write myself, except stdio.h and SDL2.

This provided a very good learning opportunity to write basic things myself such as a dynamic array (vector) and an entire math header which included vectors and matrices. I later expanded upon this math header by adding quaternions, SIMD matrix multiplication, and more general functionality. I still use this header and you can find it on my github.

Instead of going for spheres I immediately went for triangles and created a Bounding Volume Hierarchy acceleration structure. I was able to load the Stanford bunny and display it, as seen in the image above, with 18 FPS.

Maki Monsters is an Unreal Engine 4 game we made with a team of 3 Programmers, 2 Designers, and 3 Artists. We first made the game prototype in 2 weeks, and then spent another 3 weeks refining it.

The game is a split-screen co op game where you both control a big sushi throwing sushi at some hungry monsters. If you take too long with feeding the monsters they will become hungry and try to eat you. They require one or multiple of three sushis that the players have.

Possessed! is an Unreal Engine 4 game we made with the same team as with Maki Monsters : 3 Programmers, 2 Designers, and 3 Artists. We spent 3 weeks on this game, in order to learn to make prototype games.

In the game you play as a ghost who needs to explore a procedurally generated house in order to find one of the possessable objects, possess it, and bring it back to the front door. All while avoiding the human inhabitants of the house looking around for you.