Non-Game Projects

For an industry project at Fontys, IT-Workz wanted to try out the Pixel Playground at Fontys R10, which has an nDisplay in it - a screen that spans the entire room, so about 9 meters - to host a webinar using a realistic background that can do anything they want. That screen can run on Unreal Engine 5 to simulate a virtual environment, and my team had just worked on our first Unreal Engine game, Terrabort, so we felt it natural to take over this project when Terrabort didn't get off the floor.

We went to IT-Workz's office to draw inspiration from their office designs, and then translated that into a 3D environment, with a bit more of a sci-fi aesthetic, as per the client's request. That didn't take us very long, and when we showed that to the client, they were already quite happy with it, but we wanted to do something more; we still had quite some time left, so we thought we should add an interactive component. As one of my groupmates was figuring out how to send a message to Unreal Engine through an external program, and another worked on the visuals, I made the functionality of Beamie, a friendly robot creature that was able to ascend and descend into view, and open its mouth to display questions from the webinar's Teams chat. The first ever interactive technology on the Pixel Playground.

For my first internship, I was tasked with creating an application that teaches small business owners about data. The scope of that task was quite unclear, and the vast, vast majority of the project was spent researching what this application would even look like and entail, by contacting and interviewing some actual small business owners around town, to see how much they know about data, and what data they even need to keep track of. 

I ended up with a small prototype made in Figma, and I explained to the stakeholders that in order for people to really learn about data, they can't just fill in a questionnaire and be done with it, they have to really commit to learning it using an extensive learning application, that I didn't have the time or resources to create, since I only had half a year, and didn't know much about data to begin with.