Viking Hiking is a cheerful 3D platformer made with Unreal Engine 5. It was created with a team of 20 developers. It got nominated for ‘Best Student Game’ category for the Dutch Game Awards.

My main role in the project was Programming/Tech Lead, with graphics programmer being my side role.

What did I do?

  • Focused on performance improvements relating to Unreal 5’s rendering pipeline
  • Created a world-spaced dialogue system
  • Created numerous shaders that are visible throughout gameplay
  • Managed the programmers and advised the project’s technical approach
Viking Hiking Release Trailer

Contributions

Over the span of 10 weeks I focused on a varied amount of things. My work ranged from managing the programmers in the team, making shaders, doing optimization and creating smaller features relating to the character and gameplay.

My notable work lied into optimization, I helped improved the performance of the game by looking into issues with our art, materials and scenes. I also changed a lot of settings relating to Unreal’s rendering pipeline to optimize Lumen and Nanite.

My more visible work can be seen on the right. Here I highlight features that are somewhat related to graphics programming.


Steam Release

Viking Hiking marked my first ever game release on the market.

It released with a ‘Very Positive’ rating and since then stayed there. Currently it has over 50.000+ downloads.

The game couldn’t have been made without the wonderful people on the right. It was really fun working on the game with them.


In case you want to see more aspects of the game up close, feel free to check it out down below.