Jeffrey Vermeer

I love doing gamejams!

Hanging out with friends and trying to come up with a game idea and trying to execute it in a short time frame can be fun and challenging! Usually I'm involved in environment art, materials and lighting. But I try to get more into making gameplay features!

I've also done some modding in the past.

Over the years I've participated in a variety of gamejams. Primarily: the Epic Megajam, Ludum Dare, the GMTK gamejam and the 7day FPS jam.

You can find the majority of gamejams I've done on my itch.io. Based on how fun the games are, my recommendations to play are: Face the Furnace, Desolate Drive and Joust in Love. Note: there are a few games where I messed up getting the credit on Itch, so I've added those to my page via a collection.

Highlight features I've worked on:

• The building system in Summit Stacker. I used runtime Geometry Script to create the building area and make it interactive.

• Randomized window material in Firefly Brigade.

• Procedural level boarder (with PCG) in Cargo Makes the Car Go.

• Procedural leg animation in Face the Furnace.

• Water materials and VFX in Floody Hell.

• Electrical cables and pylons in Desolate Drive.

• VFX and and status effects in Joust in Love.

• Generated geometry in Houdini almost all projects that have more than just cubes in the environment. Especially Fragments has a lot of props made in Houdini.

• Don't skip out on sleep, what takes you an hour to do poorly, while tired, you do better in 5 minutes when rested.

• Be easy going, we're doing this for fun, don't take things too seriously and give people to do things they want and enjoy!

• Try to get a core game loop together in 0.5-1 day, it doesn't have to be polished, but this is the best way I know to get everyone unblocked and working towards the same goal. This usually also leaves a good chunk of time to refine the loop.

• Before a jam starts, think about art styles and technical things I want to try out. The game idea will take priority over this if these ideas don't fit.

This is a much older project (released in 2010!) I worked on, called Xtended: Terran Conflict. Sadly the website that used to host it and the forums we used has gone down since then, but ModDB still has a page on it. The mod was a complete overhaul, changing weapon balancing, adding tons of ships, making stations more diverse and unique for each alien race.

I mostly still have this here as the project has a special feeling for me as it's the first major game related project I worked on outside of school. We used 3DS Max as our main modelling tool and I used it to build a variety of space ships and station parts.

Besides art, I also did some investigation and problem solving for collision avoidance because the AI would not "see" our space stations.