Nick Wagter

Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin

Duration : 2021-11-22 - 2024-01-01

Age of Sigmar Realms of Ruin, is an RTS game developed and published by Frontier Developments plc.

I have worked primary on aspects of the game AI.
I worked closely with level/campaign design on features needed for the campaign AI.
Next to the campaign AI, I also was responsible for the multiplayer/skirmish AI.

Vedelem: The Golden Horde

Duration : 2020-09-07 - 2021-06-22

Védelem: The Golden Horde
is a game made by Team Castle Roaches.

Steam Page

Védelem: The Golden Horde is an RTS base defender game inspired by the Mongolian invasions around 1300.
In this game, you are in control of the Hungarian forces defending their land against these invasive hordes of enemies.
Build resource buildings to increase your economy and to increase your population.

You will need every soldier you can get to defeat these horse lords!


Team :
6 Programmers
4 Artists
4 Designers
2 Producers

Outsources :
4 Technical Artists
1 Audio Composer



My contribution :
I mainly focused on the Enemy behaviours.
I was in charge of the enemy commanders, controlling the armies to raid and siege you kingdom.
Working on these systems was quite challenging as it was quite new for me to work on such complex behaviours.

This game was made with Unity using DOTS which allowed us to push the limits on the units as can be seen in the video.
Because of this, we learned a lot about data oriented development,
which was quite hard to get into, especially the relations between entities was something I struggled with a lot.
But in the end I learned a lot and was able to deliver an Enemy AI capable of a lot of different behaviours while keeping a good performance,
which allowed us to have a lot of different entities on the screen.

Védelem was featured on the Summer sales popular new releases!

Meduza

Duration : 2020-02-02 - On Going Project

Meduza is a personal project of mine where I am creating a small game engine capable of the core mechanics you would expect from a game engine like Rendering, Physics and some Optimizations.

This is an ONGOING project.

The project currently contains a DX12 renderer capable of 2D rendering (Sprites) and basic 3D textured geometry like Cubes and Sphere.

The engine is split into 2 project, a static library project with the engine code and a game layer where gameplay code should exist.
By using the ECS system in place you can already write some basic game logics, look at some test templates on GitHub for more information about the usability.

Roadmap

Planet Zoo Console

Duration : 2024-01-01 - 2024-03-26

Planet Zoo Console Edition, is a zoo management simulation game developed and published by Frontier Developments plc.

I worked on Planet Zoo console edition for a short time, helping out with some of the final bugs and implementations needed for release.

Parallel

Duration : 2020-05-07 - 2020-06-19

Parallel is a futuristic racing game that takes place on a distant planet where a local mining colony extracts ore.
Show of your racing skills with our unique double thruster controls.

Team :
4 Programmers
5 Artist
4 Designers
2 Producers


My contribution :
For this project I worked on the AI, I chose of an autonomous AI which allows for a quite agile opponent that is making use of the vision detection I set up to have knowledge on the environment.
This allows me to create an AI works on any track that gets created by designers without a lot of setup to do.

Download from Itch!

Trash Turf

Duration : 2019-05-23 - 2019-06-27

Trash Turf is a multiplayer local arena battling game.
In it, you play the role of a raccoon defending their turf the only way they know;
by swinging a giant trash bag filled with trash around!

Team :
3 Programmers
3 Artists
2 Designers
1 Producers


My contribution :
For this project I mainly worked on the events happening in the game, hazards like the Cars driving by, the fire hydrants and also the birds which deliver pickups when they are hit by the player.
Also spent a lot of time on profiling and finding performance issues in the UI, mainly caused on tick updates on the elements which could have been event driven.
This gave me a solid understanding of how important it is to profile games and find the bottlenecks early on.

Game made with the Unreal Engine in the last block of the first year at Breda University.
Download from Itch!

Utility AI RTS

Duration : 2021-04-18 - On Going Project

Utility AI Prototype

This is a small project done to learn about the use of Utility AI, for the game genre I choose RTS as it felt like an intimidating field to make AI for.

The utility AI is an interesting architecture working with curves to determine if an action should be taken or not.
I implemented the linear and Quadratic Curves and used desmos as to visualize the curves Linear Curve



This project (will) contains an AI capable of building buildings and an army.
For this the AI needs to set up an economy which contains out of wood and food.
With the army, the AI will be able to defeat his opponent or defend his base against incoming attacks.

I am doing this to learn more about decision-making for an AI, as this is something I have done to an extent of state behaviours.
And this Utility AI architecture is something I want to try out to get more familiar with different architectures.
Sources
- GDC Talk
- "Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI" by Dave Mark
- "Game AI Pro" Edited by Steve Narbin

Crime-Engine

Duration : 2020-02-13 - 2020-04-14

Team :
2 Graphics Programmers
2 Engine Programmers
4 Gameplay Programmers


My contribution :
I have mainly worked on the graphics architecture and developing a render layer for the engine developers.
For the Graphics API we used Dx12 for windows, and we also implemented a basic layer for the Nintendo Switch graphics API.
This render layer allowed them to easily draw sprites to the screen.
I also implemented a basic text renderer which allowed for coloured text to be drawn to the screen.
And I worked on the world system together with an Engine developer for the orthogonal and the isometric world view.

Quantum

Duration : 2020-01-20 - 2020-02-05

Quantum is a VR game developed for Oculus devices.
This project was build in 3 weeks as a school project at Breda University.


Team :
2 Programmers
2 Artists
2 Designers
1 Producers


My contribution :
For this project I worked mostly on the portal design and how to should function without putting a heavy strain on the Graphics rendering and making the experience as seamless as possible.
Also did the puzzle elements in the game with a simple weight check on objects to see if the object fit on a pressure pad.
And other teammate worked on the gun which allows you to move 2 objects at the same time by just moving one, as some objects are "Too heavy" to move around.

RayTracer

Duration : 2018-11-21 - 2019-01-25

CPU Raytracer
Raytracer project to learn more about Graphics programming and to learn how to use maths in a graphics project.
I Rendered 2 Images.
The first one is plane with 2 spheres showing reflection and refraction.

The Second is an image of a sphere with reflections of the surrounding cubes.

Age of Destrcution

Duration : 2018-11-12 - 2018-01-20

This is exam project for ROC A12 in Ede, Netherlands.
I made this game together with one other classmate.
For this game we had to develop it for both PC and XBOX, we did this in the Unity game engine and exported the game as a Microsoft universal game which allows you to build the game on XBOX.
With this project, I learned a lot about design patterns that can be used to improve functionality and readability of my code base.
Also learned how to work with a team member for longer than one week.

I got a passing grade on the project.

AR - Card game

Duration : 2017-09-18 - 2017-11-10

AR project made with the Unity game engine.
For this project, we needed to explore new technology we were not familiar with.
I choose to try AR as it seemed like a really cool concept.
I made some cards which I registered, and I put some objects on them, which was cool and all, but not really fun to do.
So I decided to make a prototype for a game with it.
This wizard card game is the end result.