UNUSED CHARACTER ART

Somewhere last year I had this idea for a videogame on the DS. It will probably never see the light of day for many reasons but I every so often keep thinking of new ideas to enrich the gameplay or other wacky characters. But for now the game will only be played inside my head!

SHOWREEL 2007

These are the animations I made during my years at the Willem de Kooning Academie of Fine Arts. Conveniently wrapped together in a bitesize showreel. They are mostly from the last 2 years with one exception. The goal through these years was trying to make every new project seem different while yet finding my own language. I hope you enjoy!

"A MOUSELENGTH SHORT" EP

In early 2007 I recorded with my band Antimoon all the necessary noise to make ourselves a record. Due to hardware issues and a shift in the band setting we finally published the EP a Mouselenth Short at the end of 2008.

You can download the EP entirely for free and get a bunch of artwork and wallpapers as a gift. We hope you like our first attempts of making a small record and if so, please become our MySpace friend. You know what? Just become our friend whether you like it or not cause nowadays you need the friends counter on a high number :)

A new EP is planned to surface in the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010. We think our sound has improved much so keep an eye out for when it happens!

ANTIMOON GIG FLYERS

I play in a band called Antimoon, which is dutch for the element Antimony, which is toxic but also used in childrens toys for its fireproof qualities, which is a beautifull contradiction, which is what we try to find in the rock music that we make.

The great thing about a band is playing live in front of an audience, but for them to show up they need to know. Say hello to our friend the flyer. Most of the flyers I make myself and here is a collection of my favorite ones.

HOLY COW! A game for fun

At Ranj, games are most of the time serious, whether we are doing educational things or advertisement our games serve a bigger purpose than fun alone. But sometimes we just make things for the sake of good old fun! Holy Cow is that kind of thing.

PLAY HOLY COW!

The story is again as silly as possible; the Lactorians are an outerspace race that crashed onto earth because their fueltank ran empty. Thankfully for them their engines run on milk and there is plenty of that down on earth! So they send out their last scout, or what we earthlings call an u.f.o. , to steal them some cows and you, the player, is going to help.

Unfortunately for the Lactorians the farmers, police and eventually the army will do everything about it to stop them. So pack your disintegration gun, your forcefield and some missiles and steal us some cows!

I really enjoyed working on this game, going all loose with little effects and light just to create a certain atmosphere. Also, making things go boom is not necesarrily my type of game, but it is a lot of fun to make!

CHECK OUT - a game to learn English

In the game "Check Out" four teenagers are stranded and broke on an island. In order to get back home they need to work as a team and earn money and gain hotness by, for example, organizing a "super sweet sixteen" party for the daughter of the islands richest hotel owner.
In Check-Out students learn a new language in an isometric multiplayer environment. In groups of 4 students the player has to accomplish 5 missions per level by communicating in a language foreign language only.

I will be adding more info and character/environment artwork later on.

Check Out! is a game by Ranj and Gamefactory Online, graphic design by Basiel Jaspers and Afello

DIVO'S BUZZ - a game about drugs

The first game I worked on as an official employer of RANJ was Divo's Buzz, a game to teach the player the effects and risks about different kinds of soft and hard drugs.

Divo's Buzz is not playable online, but check out the small trailer (Dutch only, sorry).



The player has the choice between several kinds of quizzes about drugs or an image/text matching game. In the quiz games negative influences of drugs and alcohol are shown in feedback animations of show master Divo. Once a match game or a quiz has been accomplished, a reaction game gets unlocked. In this game Divo is trying to make his way home from the disco. He passes dealers and “friends” offering him various kinds of drugs. If the player decides to use the drugs, then Divo will experience their side effects immediately. The more drugs Divo takes, the more intense the side effects, and the harder it becomes to successfully finish the game.

The good thing about Divo's Buzz is that it does not try to tell you that all drugs are bad (while being hypocritical about alcohol). We tried another route. Divo's Buzz will tell you honestly the effects about a certain drug that you most probably would like and dislike. The good and the bad so to speak. I truly believe that this is the best way to tell teenagers about the dangers about drugs. If you start rambling about "not doing drugs cause it's bad for ya" they just stop listening. Teenagers are curious and like to be taken seriously. But thay are also impatient and usually think that everything that is put in front of them to learn is boring. So we used the reaction game to trick them into playing the quizes. Funny thing is, the more they got to know, the more they liked to play the quizes... probably just to show off to their friends :)

GRIP - a health game

Grip is the first serious videogame
(as in something that actually got played by people instead of my little sister) for which I had the opportunity of doing all the artwork. This was right before I started working fulltime on videogames and was trying to pay the bills by selling good music in a good music store... fulltime. So the game had to be made in the spare evening hours and the weekends. Quite some killertime considering fact numbero uno: I totally underrestimated the ammount of time it would take to make a simple platformgame like this... but the project got done, people were pleased and I had a job Ranj Serious Games.

GRIP is a serious health game linked to an interactive web-based self management system for children with diabetes and their parents. By connecting personalized information from the electronic patient dossier (EPS) to a game, children learn to make decisions and develop skills based on their own current health situation. Parents and the attending physician can monitor the patients condition on a daily basis.

PLAY GRIP

So consider this situation: you have a child and it turns out to be having diabetes. You and your family are stepping into a quite new world and have to be learning a lot of new actions that have to become a part of every day life. You'll get advice from doctors and dietists and depending on the age of your child it will not always immediately understand the consequences of, say, all the different bloodsugar levels. So Grip will be a tool for them to play around with what they eat, what they do and how much insuline they should be injecting.

The setting is a silly spy story with ofcours an evil genius professor named Doctor Gluco. He is a constant menace to the Health Agency for which you will be working. In the platform game for example he stole all the files from the agency concerning diabets. So it is up to the player to retrieve the documents... which lay scattered on the roofs...

While all this running, ducking and jumping is going on the player will have to keep track of his or her blood sugar level. If it gets to high or to low it will inflict the gameplay, making it harder to get to the end. They manage their blood sugar level by eating different kind of foods or injecting a certain amount of insuline. The game was made for the Health Agency here in Holland so the game is in dutch, but I will be linking to a version of the game without text.

A blog as portfolio

Welcome to my online portfolio disguised as a blog. I am working on an actual stand alone portfolio but without proper program skills this will take a while, aspecially considering the low amount of time available the upcoming months. So to keep things easy I made this blog to post some things I worked on the last year or so and things that are in the process of creation as we speak. I hope you enjoy the works you see and the games you' ll play!