Rutger Harder

Cat Cafe Manager (2022)

The first project for our studio Roost Games, and almost entirely developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Which was rough, as you can imagine! Still really proud of this one. I did a lot of the game system design, programming (including my first Switch port) and project management.

• Steam
• Nintendo Switch

Godhood (2019)

A god game that is actually Football Manager in disguise. Development was kinda rough, and the project never really found it's footing. I was a gameplay programmer and producer on this project, but also did some of my first professional design work here.

• Steam

Renowned Explorers (2015)

Probably my personal favorite in terms of gameplay, if you can overlook some of the eeh... 'soft-colonial' aspects. Think FTL, but in a faux-19th century explorer setting, lots of characters and events, some soft RPG mechanics and turn based battles. I was a gameplay programmer and producer on this project.

• Steam

Roost Games Cooperative (2020)

Often times in risky projects, you see that workers carry the risk for the project going south (they'll be fired!), but reap none of the rewards if the project goes well. I was a co-founder of the Roost Games Cooperative, an attempt to fix this problem by acknowledging that if the workers share the risk, they should also share in the rewards. All members of the cooperative are freelancers that co-own the projects and are paid a share of all project revenue according to the amount of effort they put into that project. This is a pretty unique setup that turned out to be quite involved! I should write more about this some time.

Indievelopment Conference (2013)

We organized this conference as part of our study association in a time when The Netherlands didn't really have any game development conferences. I'm still very proud of the speakers we managed to snag. The conference itself only lasted for three(?) editions, but thankfully there are multiple amazing game dev focused conferences in The Netherlands these days.