Game Developer
About Me
My name is Reinier Maartense and I’m a 26 year old game development student at the Utrecht School of the Arts.
Ever since being a young boy and getting my hands on games, I always dreamt of creating them myself someday. Spending hours upon hours fantasizing about how I would like games to be, dreaming up games to play with friends in the schoolyard and drawing maze-like puzzles on paper. So I decided to become a game developer through which means I can create the games I dream up.
In my free time I also love to play music. I play piano, guitar and most of all love to sing.
I like to exercise as well, a healthy body creates a healthy mind which keeps me going and striving towards my goals.
What I love about development and design
According to my study I’m a game developer, which means I am responsible for the programming and most of the technical aspects of creating a game.
All students of game related disciplines at the Utrecht School of the Arts are educated as designers as well, and that is something I really enjoy.
My real passion lies in creating games for entertainment. I absolutely love designing, developing and testing gameplay, to make it look, sound and feel as fun as possible to play. I love finding the right balance in difficulty to make players feel challenged in an engaging and fair way. I also love applying techniques like screen shake, visual effects and well crafted controls to make something feel awesome to play.
Besides gameplay I also love designing and developing overarching game systems that are complicated yet easy to use. I think it is incredibly interesting what drives people to keep playing certain games, and like to learn from this and put it in effect in my own games.
Skills
Languages
Dutch - Native language
English - Fluent
Programming Languages
C# - 8 years experience
PHP - 1 year experience
C++ - 1 year experience
Software
Unity - 8 years experience
GitHub - 7 years experience
Photoshop - 13 years private experience
Favorite Games
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt inspires me because it shows me what amazing things are possible in the context of games.
It has an amazing story that lead me to read all the Witcher books and replay it after.
The art and the world is beautiful.
The gameplay feels really good and you’re able to play in many different ways.
And most of all, every piece of content is interesting, not fetch or kill quests everything is interesting and written out well.
Terraria
Terraria is one of my favorite RPG sandbox games ever. The Sheer amount of content is on another level. I love how actively they kept developing the game after it’s release.
After reaching a certain point in the game, the entire world is completely transformed and the difficulty thrown up immensely which I think is awesome. Every time you think you’re getting strong you encounter something new to defeat, it’s a game that keeps giving.
The Binding of Isaac
The binding of Isaac is the king of replayability. This game, besides having a huge amount of content has a lot of randomness to it which makes it almost infinitely replayable.
Within this contents there a lot of really interesting mechanics which inspire me, and drive me to work on my own games every time I play.
I also love the enormous amount of achievements to go after.
Recently they released a new expansion and I’m on the grind again
Other games I spent way too much time on, in no particular order:
Path of exile, Minecraft, League of Legends, V Rising, Last Epoch, Elden Ring, Vampire Survivors, Apex Legends, Grim Dawn, Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley, Monster Hunter, Dark Souls, Darksiders, Rogue Legacy, World of Warcraft, Archeage.
Music
One of the things I spend most of my time on besides game development and gaming is music.
This is a video of me playing Blackbird by The Beatles.
Favorite Artists
The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Guthrie Govan, Soundgarden, Seether, Black Sabbath and Greta van Fleet