Robin van Grinsven

Soil Simulator

In this mobile game soil simulator, you play as a farmer who wants to grow his crops and keep a fertile ground.
This educational game is developed by me for the students of the University Aeres. The students study how to maintain a fertile ground.
By giving the students a safe place to experiment with virtual lands, they can apply the knowledge they gain in the classroom.
Seeing the effects of their actions on the land they can reflect on what went wrong and how they can do it better in the future.

When I came to work for the company, there was a basic game already. However the client had new wishes for the project. The previous employee who worked on the product, left the company without leaving any document on how the game should be expanded.
The frontend of the game was developed in Unity and the backend was a c++/mysql server. using websockets as a communication method. It was my sole responsibility to bring the project to the client. I designed the features as requested by the client.

This meant that I developed UI, client/server communication, and made schematics of the SQL database. Change/adept 3D models. Wrote shaders, analyzed suggestions and improved on the performance and UX.

There was some room to improve the project as I saw fit. However , It was requested to switch tasks during execution of the improvement. I had a couple of suggestions for improvement for the game:

• Perspective: Currently when playing the game the User gets the side view of the ground. This does not give the immersive feeling of owning a farm. To improve the feeling there should be a bird-eye view perspective of the land.
• Buy/Sell Properties: This includes Lands/Vehicles and Labor. By creating these interactions the player gets a feeling of investment and growth of the farm. This creates more engagement.
• Leveling up/Unlocks: Another trick well known in the game industry is creating a sense of growth and achievement. It's also a way for the students to create a healthy competition between themselves, which is an opportunity for them to interact with each other.
• Multiplayer: By giving the students the same start time and end time. While they can help each other out and compete. Motivate the player to do their best and give each other tips on the game. Therefore, Increasing the learning and sharing value of the game.

3D configurator

The company is a website development driven company. To get the most out of my experience, I proposed to the company to offer a 3D product configurator as a part of the product line. When the company gets in contact with clients that want a webshop, we could propose to add a 3D configurator as an option for the customer.

However during research, we concluded that to get most clients full inventory converted to 3D would not be practically viable. 3D scanning would require a cleanup phase and not all products are 3D scannable, or would not produce that nice of a result.

These are some techniques I looked into, to realise the 3D configurator:

• Babyon.js: Built for games on WebGL. Good for the configuration possibilities.
• Three.js: Built for WebGL javascript support. No need for Wasm support from the browser. Has the biggest user base.
• Unity: Uses Wasm and WebGL. Using an editor makes the process easier. Big user base.
• Unreal: No longer support HTML export. There is a new technology called PixelStreaming.
• Godot: Export HTML and Wasm support. Open Source project.