About Me

Hello, my name is Jordi van Swam
I'm a 26 year old software engineer with over 8 years of experience developing desktop and VR applications using both unreal and unity. In my work i use a combination of c++, c#, blueprints and other engine tools to achieve the best possible result. My flexible skill set in combination with my many years of working in mixed discipline teams have proven to be of value to the any project I've worked on.

Skills

8 Years Project Experience

Featured Projects

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Shattered Lights - student project

A Roomscale VR horror game where you physically walk around to explore

Project Summary

Shattered lights is a VR horror game with a unique way take on player locomotion. Using impossible geometry the player is able to seamlessly explore an underground bunker by only walking around their playspace. With rooms changing around the player while out of their sight.

Personal Contributions

On this project i worked together with several other programmers and designers. As such a lot of work was devided between us. I personally focused on the features most directly connected to the player. The most important of which was our unique non-euclidian locomotion system. Wich i performed the research and implementation for. But i also worked on several smaller systems. Such as player interactables, gameplay encounters, sounds, optimizations and many more.

Optimization

Another important aspect of any VR title is performance. A smooth 90 fps experience must be maintained at all time to prefent motion sickness. As such i used this project as an opportunity to learn the basics of game optimizations. From limiting drawcalls to LOD's and the difference between forward and deferred rendering as well as how to use tools like renderdoc to pinpoint bottlenecks.
And through these effort we were able to get shattered lights to run smoothly on our intended hardware.

Unannouced Shooter

A 4 player coop shooter inspired by helldivers

Project Summary

This project is a 4 player co-op shooter inspired by helldivers.
In the game a group of up to 4 players work together to extract a valuable artifact from the surface of a hostile alien world. Players must battle waves of incoming enemies as they slowly upgrade their arsenal over the course of a mission.

Personal Contributions

This project was developed with a small team meaning that i was involved in a large part of the gameplay. I was mainly responsible for the interactions on the player side but ended up helping a lot on the enemies aswell.The following is a list of highlights and should not be consided a complete representation of all the work provided.

Muliplayer GAS setup

Because this project was our first major experience using multiplayer we decided to use the Gameplay Ability System (GAS) framework from unreal. This framework handles a lot complicated replication concepts such as predictive abilities and bandwith limits.
While this framework is powerful it also has a bit of a learning curve to it. As such i was tasked with setting up GAS for our project and to teach the rest of the team how to properly utilize the system.Setting up the gas system took around 2 weeks and my learnings on how to properly utilize the system continued all throughout development. Each time i would make a new discovery i would also share it with the team through messages or direcly when helping them solve an issue.in the end GAS ended up being a huge boon to this project. As it provided a standardised structure that allowed for developers with limited replication experience to still make multiplayer compatible content.

Player Weapons

As a shooter one of the main player interactions will be to shoot their guns. As such it was important that this system was setup properly and that designers could easily tweak it. We also had to make 15 different weapon items in only 6 months.To manage these requirements I decided to not overcomplicate the sytem and made a single weapon base class that would handle the core functions of shooting the gun. Such as spawning the projectile, applying recoil, consuming ammo etc. We could then make all weapon types as child classes that simply used different settings and visuals.This ensured that all the different weapon types in our game were using the same underlying code. Which made it easy to track down bugs and to introduce new features.
It also made it easy for designer to tweak the weapons as they had a giant list of settings that they could change and no way for them to accidentaly introduce new bugs.

Enemy Locomotion

A few months into the project our client expressed an interest in having our enemies not only navigate on floors, but walls and ceilings aswell. Knowing that under our timeline we could not manage this request we decided to use a marketplace plugin that claimed to be plug and play.
Unfortunately the plugin had some limitations. The largest of which is that it did not support root motion animations, wich was something our enemies relied on. As such I had to extend the plugin's pawn code to support networked root motion as well as fix other issues with our enemy behaviour that resulted of this wall navigation.

Pre-Flight Checklist

A VR training demo for pilots performing a pre flight check.

Project Summary

Pre-Flight Checklist is a VR training program for pilots. In the scenario pilots need to perform a visual inspection of their plane using a checklist to make sure their plane is in good condition.In the main scenario pilots need to drag every checklist element to their corresponding component and are asked whether the item passes the inspection. Several elements are randomly assigned to be broken which the pilot needs to identify to pass the scenario.

Personal Contributions

I worked as a solo programmer on this project, As a result I had to set up the entire gameplay flow of the project. I was able to streamline a lot of the work by using our existing template which takes care of the vast majority of VR interactions such as grabbing and teleporting.However our company template did not take care of every requirement and some elements had to be custom made. Such as the checklist and point of interest system.

Bioside - Student project

A Zero gravity VR shooter demo

Project Summary

Bioside is a VR shooter where the player needs to navigate in a zero gravity environment. Using a variety of guns to defeat the enemies that stand in their way.Bioside's main selling point is the combination of zero gravity movement with the intense action of shooters. Giving the player full 3d control of their position in the level and letting them use the environment to its fullest ability.

Personal Contributions

I was involved in many different aspects of biosides development. Due to me setting up the inital project and blueprint classes i became a cornerstone of communication for the project. Helping out with issues in nearly all gameplay systems and building up an deep understanding of the projects structure.Alongside that i also still able to develop several systems myself.

Project Setup

This project originally started 1 week before a major vacation. Because this was my first VR title i was excited to jump in and decided to spend some of my free time during the vacation to setup a basic template for our project. To accomodate this i made sure to get a bunch of specifications from designers before the vacation started so that my framework would fit with the vision for the project.In this prototype i set up the basic zero gravity navigation where the player could grab the environment and throw themselves around. I also made a pistol that the player could grab and shoot as well as some targets.This jumping off point proved very usefull as we immidately had an enviroment where designers could test their ideas. And level artists could see how their design would interact in the context of zero gravity.

Drone enemy

After setting up the basic template I started to focus on a specific task. For me this was our main enemy in the game, the drone.For navigation we used a free 3d-navigation plugin, Which after some debugging worked well for our needs. The drones themselves were simple. Having only 2 states, patrolling and attacking. The main complications came from the multiple ways the player could interact with the drone. With the player able to grab the enemies, several unique death animations and with them having to navigate around line of sight obstructions. The enemies became quite complicated but in the end all systems were able to work together without any bugs.

Zero-G locomotion

The big selling point of this game was its Zero gravity environment. And while turning off gravity in a game engine is easy enough. Making the navigation feel good is quite a challenge.Our navigation came in 2 parts. First the player was able to grab any part of the environment and throw themselves off the wall. And the second were small hand thrusters intended for course correction.
For the wall grabbing I built a system that let the player move themselves around when grabbing the environment. With special focus on collision resolution, as the unreal default collision blocking caused jittery results.We also added a special calculation for the launch angle when a player would release themselves from the wall. For this process I worked closely together with designers to tweak the system so you could reliably launch yourself in the direction you inteded to.

Trailer

When it came time to release the game I worked on a trailer for the store page. As part of the trailer we tried to record a mixed reality section where we merged a recording from the player on top of gameplay.
While I was technically able to successfully pull this off. The static angle of the camera and the poor color correction make the effect quite underwhelming. In spite of this the rest of the trailer was more successful. with good cinematic shots and an upbeat pacing.

Active Safety
[ Page under construction]

A VR safety training for PIT operation in warehouses

Super Nova

A VR Combat-Action Game were you fight using gestures

Project Summary

Supernova Is a VR combat action game where the player can fire projectiles by performing several different boxing gestures, such as jabs, uppercuts and hooks. This together with an arsenal of supplementary powers the player is tasked with defeating an onslaught of enemies as they traverse through each level.

Personal Contributions

Super Nova has been in development for over 3 years and as such has gone through many different prototypes during its development. Since I've been with the project since the start I've worked on many aspects of the game. Therefore the following list should be considered a highlight of the provided work and not a comprehensive list.