Story about myself and development of Unlock news

Hi there!

Thanks for browsing to this page. It means a lot to me that you're interested.

First I would like to introduce myself!
My name is Tim Haerkens and I'm from a small village in the Netherlands.
I grew up on a farm with cows, pigs and sheep.
When I was 5 I could read so they put me in a higher class.. I was always the youngest one.

I was always interested in making games and I discovered Flash when I was 13 I guess.
I made simple flash movies and games but I never really finished anything good.
When I discovered Minecraft I began building huge projects on the server I was on.
Because noone really looked at my work more than 5 times I decided I wanted to make
a parcours map with puzzle levels/jump levels/hidden buttons etc.

This was a huge success and people kept coming back and even hosting their own races with friends.
I kept making more levels and later I began a whole new project.
With this little knowledge of making games I signed up for a Game Design & Development college.

I had to show my previous work (flash and minecraft), design a board game, fill in some surveys and do an interview. Luckily I was accepted and finished year 1, starting year 2 in two weeks.

For Unity classes we had to make a simple game with the things we learned in class.
I didn't really pay attention in some classes so I didn't really know where to start.
When the deadline began to came closer I decided to practice my C# scripting skills and understanding the Unity software.

Very quickly I had a simple platform game, but I sucked at graphics so it was really ugly at first.
I really liked what I was doing so I kept spending hours of my free time in the game.
I went from copying scripts of the internet to coding my own scripts.

When the deadline was there I handed in what I had, a simple prototype of my game with a few levels.
I still spend a lot of hours in it so it had a lot of features and several levels. I got a 9,4/10.

The teacher liked the concept of the game and advised me to improve the game so that he could give me a higher grade at the end of the year. So that's what I did..
I spent around 300 hours in the summer holidays on improving the levels, textures, completely rebuilding the levels in square tiles and a totally new GUI.
I added a lot of features, some that don't even make sense (like dubstep gun).
But even if some of those features don't work or are unneccesary, they still teach you a LOT.

As a result, the second grade I got is a 9,8/10.
"The goal of this class was to give everyone a basic understanding of programming and working with the Unity Engine, and you are on intermediate/advanced level. I must say, you've got the skills so keep up the good work!"

I spent so much hours working on this game that I got a very good understanding of the C# language and even the Javascript language that I don't use a lot. Also, I know a lot of very useful Unity features that I didn't know before.

Unlock is a very big project with a great amount of features so as a solo project it takes up a lot of my time. I think I already spent around 500 hours on this project, but I don't regret it.
I enjoy working on this project a lot so I will update this page with news and progress,
and I hope to release a demo version as soon as possible.

Keep tuned!

Friendly greetings,
Tim Haerkens