This game was made during the 'Group Projects' course in my last year at DAE and is based on the lost 'Ter Doest'-abbey near Bruges in Belgium. Today, only the large barn remains, but recent discoveries have made it possible to paint a complete picture of what Ter Doest looked like in the past. The client, Provincie West-Vlaanderen, wanted to bring more attention to the place because of this. One way to do this, was to create a mobile game that would familiarize visitors with Ter Doest in a playful way. While the game is still focused on entertainment, players can learn more about the place progressing.
In Hoog Bezoek, your objective is to gather enough resources before Philip The Bold arrives. You do this by rebuilding the abbey to its former glory.
Each building you rebuild will grant you the ability to produce new resources, moving you closer to your goal. Each building also provides information about its historical purpose.
The in-game layout of the buildings is following the recent discoveries which mapped Ter Doest's underground ruins. The game start with just the barn, drawing a straight line to the real barn still remaining today.
Since the game requires a lot of UI interactions, I needed to create a system that would make UI pop-ups easier to manage. By leveraging the IClickable interface one of the other devs made, I managed to smoothly transition the UI pop-ups in and out of frame. Pop-ups for buildings would have an 'info' button that would open another pop-up, so flawless transition between the UI's was necessary. With the system I created, putting the pop-ups in a 'selected' state, this was prefectly doable.
WIP
Since we were working with an external writer, we had quite some text to manage. I created a system that would allow the writer to simply fill in a Excel file specifying the character's name and dialogue (in different languages). This would then be converted to a CSV file, of which the dialogue data would be loaded in via an ID in a JSON file. The JSON file included extra meta-data, such as the position of the character or a focus on a certain object, which the devs could control (the ID's are in Dutch because it was easier to manage for the writer).
WIP
Kris Catteau (Art)
Zora Daems (Art)
Vahit Saygin (Art)
Warre Stoop (Dev)
Bram Verhulst (Dev)
Jelle Adyns (Dev)
Dorien Vander Linden (Writer) (RITCS student)