Introduction

My name is Django den Boer, I’m 27 years old and I am a graduation student at the Utrecht School of Arts, Game Design and Development, Master Degree.
I’m currently employed at E-semble as 3D artist. And as you might guess, most of my free time is spent playing as much games, a good designer needs to know what’s out there. Of course I also have a social life, I own a house in which I live together with my girlfriend and have a rabbit that growls.

You might notice that this introduction sounds awfully familiar, which is true. Last year I started the Honest Sound Project (http://honestsound.blogspot.com) in collaboration with my classmate Tom van Kruijsbergen. Although the concept of the project was well received, it didn’t work out like we expected. In the end we decided to can the project and to start over, a good example of a kill your darlings moment. Looking back , the project was just too ambitious for the little amount of time that was available.

So what am I up two now?
My new project is called “Rocket Training” and is focused on teaching en learning mechanisms that are applied through level design. Tutorials basically. The project is split in two parts:

Supportive narrative
This document is a collection of learning methods that are analyzed through case studies and literature studies. The end result is meant to be sort of a guideline that can be applied by fellow game and level designers while they are building their tutorial levels.

Game Prototype
The idea is to replicate a small portion of a level from an existing FPS (First Person Shooter) that contains a single weapon pickup. In the course of the project I plan to alter the tutorial methods to be able to test my findings.
The prototype is going to be built in UDK(Unreal Developers Kit) and will probably be using the already onboard rocketlauncher.

The new project is meant to be a solo project and is considerately scaled down (compared to Honest Sound) to increase the prosperity of the project.

That’s all for now. More information will follow.