Dylan Dophemont

One of the exciting projects I’ve worked on at school was Soulbound. The alpha version of the game was made between October the 14th 2013 and Januari the 30th 2014 for PC, Mac and Linux. You can still download and play the alpha version!

Soulbound is a action-adventure game that mixes elements of Diablo and Pokemon. In this game you play as the Beast Master and explore sprawling dungeons. But the Beast Master is not strong enough to withstand the monsters that lurk in the dark. Instead you need to tame these monsters and let them fight for you.

You start of with a few monsters that’ll accompany you in you journey. They have two abilities, one normal attack and a special ability. The monsters you defeat can be added to your team or you can use them to heal the Beast Master. If the Beast Master dies, the game ends. The goal is to make it to the end of the dungeon where a boss battle awaits you.

Game characters

My main role in the project was working on part of the 3D models for the game – such as characters and level assets. This also included the rigging and animation of these characters. The characters were all based on drawings that were made by the lead artist in our team. We were on a tight schedule so the characters were pretty low poly. But in total we managed to make five playable characters that had all a similar style.

This is the character I am most proud of and was the last character I made for the game. The skeleton character had a retractable bow and a special animation where it exploded in various pieces. Also, if you have this character in your team, it plays its bow like a violin. Here’s the animation for the special attack of the skeleton character.

The golem was the second character made during the project. It was the biggest and also the slowest character in the game.

The first character created was off course the Beast Master. The first version of this character had a whip used for taming the monsters. But because of some difficulties this got removed in following versions.

Opening Scene

Part of the teaser, which you can see in the last part of the following video, was also made by me. The video was also used in the trailer and as the opening scene for the game.

Further development

Although there were further plans to continue development after the alpha state, the team fell apart in an attempt to create a new version of Soulbound. This happened a while after the announcement of the game being greenlit on steam. There’s still some cool artwork up on the Facebook page. I guess, for now, the project is put on hold.

I think we got some nice coverage on the game. Here are some links on the coverage we got.

• Diablo, Pokemon inspire student-made game Soulbound (Gamasutra)
• Playable Alpha + Greenlight: Soulbound, a creature management action RPG (Indie games weblog)
• Soulbound demo découverte jeu indépendant (Gamedeo.net)
• Rotterdam University’s Game Design School Serves Up an Ace with “Soulbound” (Gameplayersreview.com)
• Badplan plays Soulbound (part 1)
• Terinspirasi dari Diablo dan Pokemon, Para Siswa Membuat Soulbound

I’d like to thank everyone involved for an amazing experience:

• Selmir Aljic
• Ralph Amian
• Bjorn Buchner
• Mark Dijkema
• Gilles van Kralingen
• Oswin Kroon
• Yu Li
• Peter van der Lugt
• Bart van den Oord
• Jonathan van Putten
• Robert Tangerman
• John van de Water
• Guido de Wolf
• Frank Wypchol

And thanks to everyone who tested and played the game.

Had fun making this little game past weekend. It was made during the 31st Ludum Dare with the theme “Entire Game on One Screen”. At first I tried making something else. But with no clear direction, halfway through, I got what I thought was a better idea – Tiny Bear Adventure. Basically, in this game, you just place tiles on the playing field and see how this bear with a sword and a shield moves to a random tile. It’s very random, yeah, but with a little more work, I actually see some potential in this silly little game. So I’ve decided I will try and work on this in the weekends to come.

Play Tiny Bear Adventure!.

This is Last Mum Standing, a game I made for the annual, third gameboy jam, which was held from the 1st to the 10th of August. It’s not really what I wanted it to be. I had some trouble with figuring out HaxePunk. But I managed to make a neat little game within the time limit.

In conjunction with HaxePunk, I used GraphicsGale for graphics and animations. Sounds were made with Korg DS-10 for Nintendo DS.

Play it on Game Jolt!

The 27th Ludum Dare was a great experience and lots of fun. Also, a lot of people gave some good feedback on my game. Brian Devins was one of those. He commented that he really loved Catch A Train and even composed a soundtrack for it! I think the soundtrack he made fits in really well, so I decided to do an update on my game.

Many thanks Brian, I love the soundtrack you made!

Play Catch A Train with sound!

During the last year of my previous education, IT Mediaproductions, I did my internship at a web design company called TiDi Graphics. During this period I made a game where you bump your way to the finish line. It was called Bumper Madness.

Note: The text in the game is Dutch.

Play!

Before I started developing this game, I barely had an understanding of game development. So I started learning Flash. Because TiDi is a web design company, I thought it might be suitable to build it with Flash. After some weeks I discovered this 3D engine for flash, called Papervision3D. I had some experience in using Blender, which came in very handy in making 3D assets as the one shown below.

Most of the assets of the game I made myself. Two sounds I downloaded from freesound.org, an excellent source to get your sound effects! Especially if you don’t have the resources or the time to create your own sounds. The other sound effects were created with my synthesizer – a Korg EMX. I made the graphics using Photoshop.

Sadly, this game has never seen the light of day… Until now! So go and beat that hiscore!

Pfew, that was tough, but fun! After 48 hours I made my first game for the 27th Ludum Dare – Catch A Train. First, I brainstormed about the theme – 10 seconds. And I came up with this simple, yet fun idea, where you try to catch this train in 10 seconds.

The simple sketch I drew, shows the characters who will hold you from catching that train. But in the end I stuck to the idea to push your way through the mass of passengers who just came out of the train.

I only had 48 hours, so I used tools that I was familiar to (A lesson I’ve learned from the 7DRTS). I used the following two tools to build this game:

• Flex SDK (4.6)
• Gimp (2.8)
• Wunderlist (to keep “track” of things :D)

I had some trouble with coding the physics of the game. Definitely something I need practice with. As I’d like to participate in future 48 hour competitions, I will learn some cool new tricks about physics.

If you like my game, please vote and/or comment on the entry page of Catch A Train. While your there, check out the other cool games!

Play Catch A Train!