Sjors van Holst

Melted is still one of my favorite project memories. In the last three weeks of my first year of secondary vocational education CMD, we were given the opportunity to create a passion project. I teamed up with Tim van Ingen and Sena Nur Korkutan to create a 2D multiplayer puzzle game.

In Melted, you solve the mystery of melted ice cream by finding clues and solving puzzles with your co-op player to locate a missing kid. The game was written in Unity using C#. We wrote almost all the logic ourselves, including 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, learning a lot about optimizing 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!