Mathias Dierickx - Portfolio

Sackboy: A Big Adventure is a 2020 platform game developed by Sumo Digital and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for both the PlayStation 4 and 5.

This project shows off a 2D multithreaded game engine, designed from scratch and implemented using C++ and SDL.

This project uses a custom engine written in C++ and DirectX. The engine features post processing effects, hardware skinning, particle effects and shadow mapping. The game is a copy of the boulder levels from Crash Bandicoot. The level and gates were modelled by me, the other models were found online. All animations come from Mixamo. The engine doesn’t feature an editor so designing the level was partially done in code and mostly created in 3D studio max and exported through max script to the engine.

Pray, prey! is the result of the course ‘game projects’ at dae. During this course, we made a game demo with a team of 4-6 people in the theme of a couch party game. My team and I decided to go with a cat and mouse themed game, where one player can play as a hawk and up to two other players can play as mice. The goal for the mice is to get to the end of the level, while getting enough score to open the passage to safety at the end. But the hawk is hungry, so it’s goal is to catch and kill the mice! The mice can shoot and kill the hawk, but the hawk will always keep coming back. Once a mouse is death, it stays dead!

This project was made from scratch, using SDL to display 2D textures. It is a clone of the opensource project ‘FreeCraft’, which in its turn is a clone of the popular game ‘WarCraft2’. It was the first full solo project made as part of my education at DAE.

The FreeCraft project was shut down by Blizzard, so this project contains copyrighted materials and the only purpose of CloneCraft is purely educational.

It features level loading from an image, basic enemy AI, a great variety of units, buildings and upgrades the player can explore.