Coder with a passion for video games. Gamedev since 2012.
Year of Birth: 1989
Citizenship: The Netherlands
Address: Fogdevreten 8, LGH 1202, SE-171 65 Solna, Sweden
Portfolio: http://sanderman01.github.io/portfolio
Email: sanderman@gmail.com
Phone: +46 76 004 39 54
I like to experiment to learn new techniques, technologies or skills, though finding time to do so can often be difficult when there are so many fun video games to play and books to read. Other hobbies include reading Fantasy and Science-Fiction novels, and pen & paper roleplaying games.
Designed and implemented various game systems for Co-Op FPS games GTFO and Den of Wolves, and other duties like backend, tooling, performance profiling, optimization, diagnosing crashdumps etc. During my time here I also worked on the Core Tech, Player Journey, and Backend teams. Notable work:
Me and Stanislav Eremeev set up the Den of Wolves project during early pre-production, using Unity’s Data Oriented Tech stack. (DOTS) Gameplay sim ran in ECS worlds, with client world handling local sim and presentation, and authoritative server world handling important stuff. Using ECS worlds allowed us to easily run both server and client worlds within the same Unity Editor process to test client-server networking. ECS paradigm allowed us to enforce very strict isolation between client and server worlds state, which would otherwise be difficult to achieve in a traditional Object Oriented Unity GameObject paradigm, and also allowed us to take advantage of Unity’s Jobs system and Burst compiler in many game systems. Unfortunately Unity’s DOTS stack also created new difficulties. A lot of Unity systems and APIs were still traditional GameObject style and hard/expensive to access from within ECS or vice versa. Baking assets into Entity Scene format also introduced extra complexity.
Goal was to give tech artists tools to create destructible objects, and to allow various effects on trigger, such as object replacement with more detailed destroyed objects, and cheap primitive network syncing. To avoid load on dedicated servers, Destruction was to use custom sync rather than our standard NetEntity sync. Achieved with a client-only destruction sim approach. Client sim sends messages to server and other clients indicating destroyed objects. Server acts as message broker and bookkeeper. This partial syncing was fine as long as destruction did not significantly affect bullet hits, player collisions or health. Ironically it was later decided to pivot to Peer-to-Peer networking.
Goal was to enable free movement throughout the entire volume of the rooms of the complex. Achieved efficient pathfinding through volumes by dividing the level into multiple regular grids based on rooms, creating a sparse data structure. I used hierarchical pathfinding.Combined with clustering cells and bitpacking this allowed low memory usage, high data locality, and high performance. Each gridcell had a 4bit distance value, creating a distance field, to allow pathing for various size flyers.
Various porting projects and in-house projects: Most challenging was Escapists2 to mobile as it required extensive networking changes and extreme optimization efforts. The Shadowrun port was another large project requiring extensive UI changes. Various other in-house ip projects and gamejams.
Porting SpeedRunners to XboxOne and Fuze. Integrating platform systems such as: networking, matchmaking, application lifecycle management, cloud saves, achievements, voice chat, etc. Technical Requirements (TRC) implementation, testing and bugfixes.
Implementation and optimization of the Willem II Passage Occulus Rift VR sim and attached Arduino bike sensor system. Designing and implementing gameplay for various logic and spatial awareness puzzles for an in-house ip puzzle-detective exploration game prototype targeted to tablets.
Collaboration with Gamious, Amsterdam. Developing level editing tools, UI, and other game systems. Drafting and implementing levels. Conceptualizing novel ways to combine existing game mechanics. Developing control schemes for gamepad and touchscreen. For PC, Mobile and Ouya.
Little Chicken, Amsterdam 2012
Blewscreen, Tilburg 2010
HBO-ICT + Game Design and Technology at Fontys Eindhoven (Bachelor of Science)