My name is Querijn Heijmans, I’m a Senior AAA Game and Tools Developer. I’ve worked on mostly proprietary engines, primarily the Foundation Engine, which powers the Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider series and Marvel’s Avengers. Besides that, I’ve worked on the Decima Engine, and its tools, for Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and Horizon Forbidden West for PC. Outside of work, I’ve coded League of Legends game servers, League of Legends packet readers, file format readers, League of Legends model viewers, and tried to make game tools that I never really ended up happy with.

When I turned 18, I decided that Game Developer would probably be a future for me, and did International Game Architecture and Design, a 4-year university course where I focussed on all aspects surrounding C++ AAA game development. After university, I shifted around a couple of jobs that lacked the challenge until I ended up becoming a Systems Developer at Nixxes.

Here at Nixxes, I started work on Marvel’s Avengers, a then unannounced project made in the Foundation Engine. One of my primary tasks was to come up with a system that allowed designers to reuse existing environments and dialogue, but adjust them to their heart’s content to make it seem like a unique environment. It was a completely parametric tool for designers and artists to choose conditions (world, level, game progress, characters on team) to load sets of rules to apply to the current game session.

A use-case for this tool was a level where you would enter a completely desolate and destroyed world, but after entering a bunker and time-traveling to the past, the exact same terrain would be present, with lush life and trees and new enemies. Other usecases was to disable dialogue from the background narrator, Jarvis, in ’timelines’ where the existence of Jarvis did not make sense, or locations where Jarvis couldn’t reach the player’s team.

This tool was praised, and sometimes the narrative designers would create empty narrative prompts in the original system to override them in every single situation, just because it was easier. Additionally, a Crystal Dynamics narrative designer mailed me, thanking me for the tool. Maybe a bit silly, but I cherish that mail to this day.

Aside from this primary tool, I also worked with high-level rendering tasks, such as occlusion, texture mipmapping and depth of field improvements. I maintained and improved build systems for animations, and text obfuscation for instance. Finally, I worked on the XBOX Series X/S and Playstation 5 ports, which were unannounced consoles at the time.

After Marvel’s Avengers, we worked on Horizon Zero Dawn’s remaster for the PC and PS5. For this project we upgraded the whole game from Horizon Zero Dawn’s Decima Engine (2017) to a fresh and stable state of the engine used for Horizon Forbidden West. I hacked away at the DLC areas, which used a newer, slightly different version of the engine from the base game, primarily to unblock the lighting artists from working on that area. Aside from that, I built tools that rendered the game on several Playstation 4 and 5 devices to ensure gameplay parity and for art reviews. This tool was later extended to also re-render the cutscenes used in the game at a higher resolution and with the newer assets.

After Nixxes I joined IntelliMagic, which later got bought up by IBM. Here I worked on IntelliMagic Vision, where I built the C++ data processing side of things. IBM mainframes spit out billions of little tiny blobs of data, containing all kinds of data about the state and tasks of the mainframe, which we aggregate and forward into a database to display on a webpage in the cloud for customers to view. The challenge here is to get the data to the website as fast as possible, but also in a maintainable fashion. Every hour of data needs to be processed in less than an hour, or we’ll start later on the next hour, which means we fall behind in processing. I focussed almost entirely on a new method of data delivery and optimising the existing one. Additionally, I changed a system that allowed customers to tag data to be optimal. This work allowed IntelliMagic to change the amount of tags from 1 to 8, and be able to be based on far more data fields. I won an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award at IBM for my work on this.

Finally, I took on the challenge of becoming a father of twins. This one is the hardest yet.
The big guy’s me.