Hoog Bezoek
Client: Provinicie West-Vlaanderen

Date:

September 2025 -
December 2025

Used technology:

Unity 6
C#
Perforce
JSON

Collaboration:

Client:

About:

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 while progressing.

The Game

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 starts with just the barn, drawing a straight line to the real barn still remaining today.

My Contributions

UI Pop-up system:

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.

Riverbed, Bakery and Well UI interactions:

We divided the different building interactions amongst the developers and I ended up creating the Riverbed, Bakery and Well interactions. This made me familiar with Unity's interactive UI, leveraging the EventSystem interfaces (IPointerDownHandler, ...). When interacting with the UI, I made sure to add certain playerfeedback elements. For example, the resources elements start wiggling and play a sound when you don't have enough of them. I also added some particle effects that play on interactive events, to make the UI environment feel more alive.

Dialogue system:

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).

Upgrading the Abbey:

I was also responsible for upgrading the abbey. When having enough resources, you could tap the church to upgrade the abbey. This would start a sequence, moving the camera to the new interactive building, which is built by a little animation, and starting a small dialogue congratulating you on your progress.