Internship DeStudio
From August 30th 2022 until January 27th 2023, I did my internship at DeStudio in Eindhoven. We worked on a couple of projects, but I'm going to showcase the main project on this page.
Paniek Bij De Poort
We made a 2D platformer game for Erfgoed 's-Hertogenbosch about the history of the city. The game takes place in 1585 during the Eighty Years' War. The Dutch States Army tries to conquer 's-Hertogenbosch, but fails and has to flee the city. But since the gates were closed while they were still in the city, the only way for them to escape was by climbing over the walls. In the game, your goal is to stop the enemy from climbing over the wall.
The Intro Video
I designed the 4 scenes for the Intro Video, explaining very briefly what the situation is and what the goal of the player is. It was very important for our client to have a piece of history in the game, so we chose this event in 1585 so we could include the iconic walls in the game.
Some interesting details are the windmill outside of the Pieckepoort and the sunset, since the attack happened early in the morning.
I also tried to incorporate perspective by blurring the houses in the background and blurring the trees in the distance even more. The characters are designed by one of the other interns.
The Sint-Jan church in the background was originally going to be in the background of the game itself, but because we had to make the game historically accurate, we ended up showing the other side of the wall in the game. Thankfully we could still show this iconic church in the intro video.
The last illustration slides from left to right and that's where the game starts.
The Background
I also got the task of designing the background for the game. As I said before, the original plan was to have the Sint-Jan church in the background of the game, since that is such an iconic part of 's-Hertogenbosch. But we had to change the perspective to the other side of the wall, so designing the background was a lot easier but in my opinion also a bit more boring for me.
I do however really like the paint-style i used for the illustrations, it's not a cartoon style but also not super realistic which I think turned out really nice.
The Gameplay
(My apologies for the bad quality of the screen recording, the game runs much smoother in real life)
The game will be displayed in the 's-Hertogenbosch museum in 2023.
Social Media
In the last week, we had to create a couple of pictures or videos that we could post on social media. I made a couple of videos that were fit for Instagram.
Evaluation & Feedback
I'm pretty happy with how all my illustrations turned out. I had quite a lot of trouble with getting the style right, my supervisor wanted a paint-like style that was very loose and sketchy, but I am very used to drawing everything very precise and detailed. It took a few tries to get it right, but I think the end result looks pretty good.
My supervisor was also happy with the end result. He suggested I should practice speedpainting so I could hopefully get rid of the perfectionism which is holding me back from creating. So I'm definitely going to try that out.
