Luca Yavuzok

Game Designer - Tech & UI/UX

_{Hello!
My name is Luca, I'm a Game Design graduate from Breda University of Applied Sciences.
My passion is creating gameplay systems that allow players to express themselves.
Currently working at Verdant Games
More About Me}

Professional Projects

🧬 S.P.L.I.C.E.D. 🧬

A Metroidvania where you play as a strong-willed girl determined to challenge the tyranny of the mob leader and free Chinatown from their oppressor.

Genre: Metroidvania
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Team Size: 30
Duration: September 2022 - June 2023
Platform: Windows (Steam)

Roles:
Tech DesignerGeneral Designer

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Setsuko:
🥁 Drums of Harmony 🥁

A 2D rhythm-based roguelike. Play as a spirit bard that can move, shoot and collect to deal with enemies and clear rooms, levels and zones.

Genre: Roguelike
Engine: Gudenuff Engine (custom)
Team Size: 12
Duration: 8 weeks
Platform: Windows / PS4

Roles:
General DesignerUI/UX Designer

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🌳 Vana 🌳

A 3D platformer. Play as a mysterious character helping souls pass on to the afterlife by collecting scattered pieces of their soul.

Genre: Platformer
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Team Size: 20
Duration: 6 months
Platform: Windows

Roles:
UI/UX DesignerGeneral Designer

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🚀 Distant Signal 🚀

A 3D sidescroller. Play as an astronaut in an alien tomb trying to uncover a message left behind by an ancient civilization.

Genre: Platformer
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Team Size: 15
Duration: 8 weeks
Platform: Windows

Roles:
Tech Designer UI/UX Designer

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Game Jams

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🍄Sporadic🍄
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Tech DesignerLevel Designer

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🎲DICE//KATANA🎲
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Tech DesignerLevel Designer

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🌓InktroSpective🌓
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Tech Designer

Passion Projects

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⏱Speedrun Timer QA Tool⏱
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Tech Designer

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🎮 Input Display 🎮
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Tech Designer

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🥊Rivals of Aether Mod 🥊
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Tech Designer Level Designer

Skills & Tools

Skills

Game Design 📝

Technical Design
UI/UX Design
General Game Design
Rapid Prototyping
Creative Problem Solving
Level Design

Development 🔧

Visual Scripting
^{Unreal Engine Blueprints}
Scripting
^{C#, JavaScript, GDScript}
Source Control
^{Git, P4V}
Agile
QA
Graphic Design

Languages 🌍

Dutch (native)
English (fluent)
German (intermediate)

Work Ethic 📁

Team player
Working Under Pressure
Creative Thinking
On-site working
Remote Working

Communication 🗣️

Cross Discipline Collaboration
Presenting & Pitching
Working in Small or Large Teams

Tools

About Me

_{Me and my cat, Kairi 🐱}

My name is Luca Yavuzok, I'm a 24 year old game design student studying at Breda University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands, where I specialize in tech design and UI/UX design. Before attending my current university, I graduated from a 4 year game development course at SintLucas Eindhoven.Video games have always been a huge part of my life ever since I got introduced to them at a young age. They offered me a place to escape to and also gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of friends from around the world that I otherwise would have never met.For me it all started with Ocarina of Time, but Final Fantasy VII is the game that opened my eyes as to what games could be, and I decided I wanted a career in the games industry so I can give people that same feeling I got when first playing it.Some of my other favorite games include: Super Smash Bros. Melee, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Risk of Rain 2, NieR Replicant and Kingdom Hearts II.I also really like collecting. I mainly collect video games and vinyl of music I like, but I have some other small collections too.

Contact

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SOON ™

I'm still working on this!

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🥁 Setsuko: Drums of Harmony 🥁

About This Project

My Contributions

Learnings

Project Details

A 2D rhythm-based roguelike based off of Crypt of the NecroDancer, playable on Windows and PS4.

Genre: Rythm / Roguelike
Engine: Gudenuff Engine (custom)
Team Size: 12
Duration: 8 weeks
Platform: Windows / PS4

Roles:
General DesignerUI/UX Designer

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Reception

200+

Downloads

About This Project

I worked on this project with 8 programmers, 2 artists and a producer, meaning most of the designing was done by me. Gudenuff Engine was created as an engine that can make rhythm-based top down games, meaning Crypt of the NecroDancer and Cadence of Hyrule were obvious inspirations.

My Contributions

Enemy Design

Umbrella Enemy:
This enemy moves in a predefined pattern. It deals damage to the player when it comes into contact with them. Multiple versions of this enemy exist, all with their own patterns.Ghost Lady Enemy:
This enemy charges her attack for a number of beats, then releases it after, dealing damage to the player.Long Neck Enemy:
This enemy follows the player when they are within range, dealing damage upon contact. Once the player escape's its range, it will stop following them.

Weapon Design

I started off making concepts for each weapon in Photoshop. I created animations for what I had in mind and showed these to the programmers.I made a lot of weapon concepts, but most of them weren't feasible within our engine, so we had to keep them relatively simple.

UI/UX Design

I created sketches for the beat indicator which I then showed to the programmers and artists.The floor tiles changing on the beat is a nice quality of life feature, since the player is mostly looking at their character and their surroundings rather than the UI.

Trap Design

To give ourselves more ingredients to play with when generating rooms, I came up with a few concepts for traps. These traps are incorporated in the level generation as well as manually placed in certain pre-built rooms.These traps that made it into the final build are:Spike Trap
The spike trap deals damage to the player once it comes into contact with them.Pit Trap
The pit trap is a tile that is only able to be stood on once. If the player moves off of that tile, it becomes a hole that the player will fall into and take damage.

Learnings

This project was very valuable in teaching me a lot more about the design process. I still have a lot to learn in this regard, but here are some of the most important things I learned during this project:

Working as the only designer in a bigger team

The team mostly consisted of programmers, because of this being a custom engine. This meant I had a lot of work to do in the first few weeks, so the programmers had enough time to implement everything into our engine, and had barely anything to do in the last weeks, as most things were already designed and being implemented.

Not being able to go into engine much

The only things I was able to do in engine were tweak certain values, like enemy patterns, damage values etc. So mostly for balancing. I wasn't able to create prototypes for the concepted weapons or enemies myself in engine, which improved my ability to convey ideas through sketches.

Limitations of a custom engine

While doing research, I came up with a lot of cool ideas that could make our game more interesting, but almost none of those could make it in because of the limitations of the engine. Designing around these limitations was a challenge but it made me not go with the easiest solutions.

Tools Used

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🎲 DICE//KATANA 🎲

About This Project

My Contributions

Learnings

Project Details

A fast paced FPS game created for the 2022 GMTK Game Jam. Use a variety of weapons to defeat enemies, earn points and climb your way up the online leaderboard!

Genre: FPS
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Team Size: 3
Duration: 48 hours
Platform: Windows

Roles:
UI/UX DesignerTech Designer
Level DesignerSound Designer

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About This Project

This project was made for the 2022 GMTK Game Jam in 48 hours by me and 2 fellow students. The theme for the jam was "Roll of the Dice", so we made a wave based FPS where your gun has a dice on it and each side corresponds to a different bullet type. We were very inspired by ULTRAKILL and generally just wanted to add stuff that we thought was cool.

My Contributions

Level Design

I created multiple different layouts for the level, each having a random chance of spawning when the next wave begins.The layouts I created are accommodating for the amount of vertical movement our character has, with multiple jumps, a bounce and jump pads placed throughout the layouts.I also designed the entire tutorial of the game, where the player is taught all the game mechanics.

Level layouts.

Tutorial walkthrough (text on monitors skipped for the sake of the video).

Layouts grouped together and can be dragged.

Layout change in game.

Level Spawning System

Each level layout is created by parenting the level design ingredients used to an empty object, which is then moved underneath the default play space, turned invisible and its collision turned off.Spawning each individual level layout is done by randomly selecting one at the end of every wave. The selected layout will then have it's collision enabled, become visible and move up through the default play space.

Material Editor

For this project I wanted to mess round with materials a bit, so I made a PS1 style pixelation shader and a material to make the in-game monitors like actual CRT screens.

PS1 style pixelation shader.

CRT monitor effect.

Dash lines created with Niagara.

Visual Effects in Niagara

I used Niagara to create the on-screen effect for dashing/stomping. (The dash forward effect shows when dashing in any direction. This is something I would have liked to have fixed but couldn't due to limited time)

Menus, HUD and other UI elements

I created a minimal main menu because I didn't want to spend too much of the time limit on it. The platform with glowing edges is what the game takes place on, and the dice and the katana for the name of the game.The main menu has access to starting the game, the online leaderboard, the tutorial and quitting the game.The functionality for the online leaderboard was not developed by me (by Radu Nenu), but I created the layout for it in this project.

Main Menu.

Online Leaderboard.

Learnings

This was my first game jam in a small team of 3 and also without a dedicated artist, so here's a few of the things I learned during these 48 hours:

UI on objects

I experimented a bit with displaying UI on 3D objects instead of adding them to the viewport, like the wave timer. This gave me a better understanding of combining UMG with other actors.

Using Git with Unreal

I had never used Git in combination with Unreal before, I've only used Perforce where it shows what files are checked out in engine. Git does not show you what files are checked out, so communication about who was working in what files was very important for this project.