Niels Derderian

Technical Game Designer

Welcome to my portfolio, you'll find my best projects!

I am looking for a position where I can combine my technical skills and my game design knowledge in a team project.

Looking for mainly a Technical Design opportunity, I also have a generalist profile: I like to touch to everything in game development.

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Hamster Hyperdrive

Team Size: 22 ⏱️ 4 Days 🎭 Engineer

GMTK Game Jam 2025

  1. Team Size: 22
  2. Role: Engineer
  3. Duration: 4 Days
  4. Theme: Loop
 Play on Itch

Game Overview

Set in a Tron-like universe, the player is a hamster in a wheel, fighting bugs with energy loops.

Use your mouse to control the speed and the direction of the character to draw the loop and progress through 4 Waves of Enemies and Bosses.

Tool I used:

UE iconUE icon

Gameplay Scripting - Interactive Trail

My main contribution to the jam was to prototype the interactive trail mechanic, which dynamically follows the player character and behaves as designed during interactions with enemies.

I. Player Pawn

  1. Set Up Base Player Character Blueprint
  2. Made a Cursor Input:
    1. Player Moves toward the Cursor
    2. Pawn Acceleration is based on the distance between the Pawn and the Cursor
  3. A Spline Trail is created when the Player is Moving
  4. The spline as a limited lifetime

II. Spline Trail

  1. Generation of a Spline Trail from a moving origin
  2. Detect Spline Intersection
  3. Generate a procedural mesh on closed shapes

This is the first prototype, using a Spline Component that spawns points at the cursor's location, with a spacing parameter to control how many points are drawn.

III. Procedural Mesh

The Procedural Mesh is primarily used to detect Objects within the drawn closed shape and secondarily to add visual effects.

I used a Procedural Mesh Component that use all the points between the Intersection Point and the previous point of the Spline near the Intersection as border.

I built a simple algorithm to generate mesh triangles by connecting the first point to all other points in the loop.
I'm considering reworking it using the Ear Clipping algorithm to support complex shapes.

IV. Particle Trail

Finally, I've added a separate system for the trail using a Niagara Particle System with a Ribbon.
The particle lifetime is dynamically set based on the spline's maximum length to ensure a smooth and natural decay.

Minor Contribution

  1. Game Packaging for Regular QA Tests
  2. Managed the Source Control Merges when the Engineer Lead was offline
  3. Built the Sound Setting System