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About me

I am Ruben van Gijsel

I am a generalist game designer born in the Netherlands.

Before I could hold a controller, I would watch my parents play video games. When I was old enough to pick them up and play them for myself,
I never put them down again.

One day there was a workshop at our school, ‘Gamemaker 101’, this is where I realized that I could really make video games myself.
From then on, my dream job was decided, I wanted to make video games.

Ever since then I have grown my skillset. I have used multiple game engines, drawn constantly, developed 3d modeling skills and dipped into a few different programming languages.

Every day I find something new I want to learn, and everyday I find a new way to challenge myself.

MY SKILLS

Tools

Unreal Engine 5

Gamemaker

Scratch

Jira

Miro

Trello

Blender

Perforce

Soft Skills

Planning

Teamwork

Challenge-ready

Exchanging Feedback

Kind remarks from peers

  • “You were so reliable and easy to work with, and everything you created had such personality! People always comment on the content you created because it's just so highly polished, always going beyond what it needs to be with charming details!”

  • “Thank you for all the care and love you put into crafting all the amazing content you did! It made our little world truly exciting.”

  • “You've both been a consistent point of contact. I feel like through you we all have a better understanding of the team wants.”

My Timeline

2003

Now

Our school had a workshop on making video games using Gamemaker, this is when I made my first video game.
I spent a lot of free time trying to learn Gamemaker, and even though that first game went nowhere, I learned a lot from it.

Personally, I believe this is an important factor into how I got where I am today.

In a team of 18 people, I worked on a game called Pizzapocalypse. This game won multiple awards at the BUAS showcase day.
My main role on this game was enemy design, but I also worked on the main menu environment and did a bit of modeling.

We later also submitted this game for the Dutch Game Awards, but the results of that are yet to be decided.

I finished my pre-university education and then got accepted into BUAS, where I would learn what it means to be a game designer and how to work well with others.
After I got accepted, I realized that me stepping into the video game industry became a very real possibility.
Later that day I started up Blender for the first time.

During my time in primary school, I spent quite some time creating games on a site called “Scratch.mit.edu“. In 2015, I released a game that has gotten viewed over 40,000 times.

The game is based on the famous ‘Pokémon Trading Card Game’. You open packs of Pokémon cards and can then choose to sell them or add them to your collection.

Though the popularity of this game most likely stems through my use of a popular franchise, this game was a real motivator for me to keep making games and keep moving forwards.

Together with two close friends I joined a 3 day long game jam.
I mainly worked on our games presentation/art.

Our game ended up getting ranked #1 in the presentation category, this was a positive surprise to me!