Portfolio of Dennis Haak

Commissioned by Health @ Home and designed and developed by me and 3 other students, this proof of concept game teaches recently diagnosed type 2 diabetes patients between age 50 and 70 how food, drinks and exercise affect blood sugar. The game is developed specifically for the PAL4 platform: a touch-screen computer for elderly.

The game is divided into levels and each level presents a daily schedule to the player that leads to an unstable blood sugar graph. It is up to the player to make the graph stable again. Players can do this by moving around food icons in the schedule, by adding food or exercise icons to the schedule or by removing food icons from the schedule. Each change immediately affects the blood sugar graph. This way players can directly see how their changes have influenced the blood sugar. We created two scenarios for the game, each consisting of 4 levels. Through playing these scenarios players learn that spreading out meals over the course of the day helps to keep the blood sugar level stable and that exercise is useful for lowering blood sugar.

Key to designing and developing this game were the playtest sessions we conducted with our target audience. The game ended up containing quite a lot of written text and explanations, because we discovered that our audience required step-by-step guidance to be able to understand everything.

Tasks: Created the game concept in collaboration with the 3 other members of my team, wrote all of the texts for the game, wrote design documentation for the client, managed the team, did research into type 2 diabetes, designed the docter.

Commissioned by InnovatieNetwerk and designed and developed with a team of 8, this augmented reality boardgame shows Dutch aldermen and civil servants the advantages of the streekstation concept.

Streekstation de game is a cooperative game for 2 to 4 players. The goal of the game is to satisfy the needs of the cars that stop at the streekstation each turn. These cars either want locally produced food or local tourism. To satisfy the needs for locally produced food the farms on the gameboard need to produce food for the streekstation rather than for the world market. In order to this players have to replace the tiles of the world market products with tiles of streekstation products. To satisfy the needs for local tourism players have to replace the inaccessible nature tiles with accessible nature tiles. By replacing the tiles of the gameboard the digital landscape becomes more diverse and vibrant, farms start to earn more money because they produce food for the streekstation rather than for the worldmarket, and the local tourism income increases due to the attractive nature. Through these changes we try to show the advantages of the streekstation.

For more information about the game please take a look at the paper I wrote. In this paper I describe the game more in detail and I discuss its strengths and weaknesses.

Because we decided to create a boardgame we paper prototyped a lot during development. Together with one of my team members, Lex van den Berg, I created and playtested several paper protypes. The final paper prototype can be seen in the picture below (on the right).

Tasks: developed the concept and created paper prototypes in collaboration with one of the team members, wrote design documentation, guided the artists and programmers during production, was responsible for client presentations.

A traditional run-and-gun game that I designed with 3 classmates. You take on the role of a mean, lean, bald space marine and your goal is to kill fluffy, but lethal space koala bears.

Tasks: developed the concept in collaboration with my 3 class mates, managed the team, designed the levels and enemy encounters.

A point 'n click adventure that I designed with 4 classmates as part of a course on level design. You take on the role of a little girl who is held captive by a disturbed cook in an old creepy house. Your goal: escape the house without getting caught by the cook.

Tasks: developed the concept and levels in collaboration with my classmates, wrote the level design documentation, created a lot of animations for the little girl and the cook.

A java-based game for the mobile phone that I designed together with classmate Peter Groeneweg. You play as Napi, a magical butterfly who needs to color the empty organic shapes in the world. Napi automatically flies through the world and when she intersects with a shape she lights up with a certain color. You need to fill the shape with this color by quickly pressing the corresponding key on your mobile phone. By doing this you score points.

Tasks: developed the concept in collaboration with my classmate, designed levels, programmed 1/3 of game in J2ME, wrote design documentation.

A concept for a Wii game that is targeted at the elderly. Think Wii Sports + traditional indoor/outdoor games that elderly are familiar with and you have Wii Age. I designed this concept together with 4 classmates for a course in which we learned how to pitch a concept to a publisher. Our trailer and pitch won the prize for best pitch.

Tasks: developed the concept in collaboration with my 4 classmates, wrote the concept document, pitched the concept to the publishers (aka the teachers), modeled and animated the croquet gameplay for the trailer.

A tile-laying card game for 2 to 4 players. Each player has a yellow "Space station" card. At the start of the game players have to create a defensive perimeter around this card with the help of the green defense cards. The goal of the game is to remove the defensive cards that surround the space station card of your opponent and destroy the space station. Players can do this by attacking the defense card with the blue attack cards. Rock-paper-scissors mechanics are used to resolve the outcome of these attacks. The first player to completely surround his oppononent's space station card with attack cards wins the game.

Tasks: developed the concept in collaboration with my classmate Peter Groeneweg, designed and produced all of the graphics, created paper prototypes and conducted playtesting sessions, wrote a large chunk of the manual.

A 3D arena shooter that I made with 4 people over the course of 3 days. The goal is to destroy incoming colored astroids by shooting the right colored bullet at them. In order to shoot the right bullet you constantly have to switch between different bullet colors.

Tasks: developed the concept in collaboration with team members, modeled and textured the turret.

A simple 2D flash game in which you have to fry bats by firing lighting bolts at them. You have 10 shots to shoot 10 bats. This is the first game I programmed entirely by myself and I am still proud of it :)