Sjors van Holst

Melted is still one of my absolute favourite projects. In the last 3 weeks of my first year of secondary vocational education CMD, we were given the opportunity to create a passion project. It could be anything we wanted. I teamed up with Tim van Ingen and Sena Nur Korkutan, and we decided we would create a 2D multiplayer puzzle game.

In Melted, you try to solve the mystery of the melted ice cream by finding clues and solving puzzles with your co-op player to figure out where a missing kid has gone. The game was written in Unity using C#. We wrote almost all the logic ourselves, including the movement, collision, navigation, and multiplayer protocols.

The best part of the project was designing the multiplayer protocol. I used websockets and Deno Deploy to run everything and learned a lot about optimising ping times and communication. The night before we had to show our work, Tim van Ingen and I decided to squash a few bugs. Then, as you might expect, 11 PM became 1 AM, 1 AM became 3 AM, and before we knew it, we had to hop on the bus without a single hour of sleep.

On the bus, I rushed out an Android build for people to play, and we also created a web build. When we tried to demo our game at school for a prize, we ran into a major problem. The WiFi connection was very slow, causing our game to completely bug out. I had never tested the system on a slow connection, and I still think back to that day and how I could have started the server on my local laptop, and everything would have worked fine. Hindsight is 20/20.

We ended up getting third place in the competition. I still think we could’ve made first place without the multiplayer problems. Nonetheless, I loved every hour of working on Melted, and I couldn't have asked for a better team. I'm not that interested in developing games, but the experience was absolutely amazing!