Joram Wessels
I first got into game development as a child, crafting my own paper board games, but things elevated when I got my hands on Game Maker at age 12. Fast forwarding 6 years to the end of high school I remembered how much fun I was having making games as a kid, and chose to do the bachelor in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam (AI being the coolest part of games, obviously).
After graduating I completed the first year of the Game and Media Technology master at Utrecht University before realizing that I would learn a lot more working on my portfolio for a year than by doing the obligatory research thesis. And my hunch was right, as the 10+ game prototypes I made that year in both Unreal Engine 4 and Unity helped land me a job at Yvora Game Studio. From early 2021 until late 2022 I helped the small team at Yvora develop a prototype for a multiplayer RPG.
In late 2022, while the team started development on a cozy building game, I started my own company Rooibos Games. From that point on I’ve been spending one day a week developing plugins for the Unreal marketplace and consulting for other indie studios using my 10+ years experience as a programmer.