David Bernhardt

Honu

Honu is a story-driven adventure game about solving puzzles using ancient magitech. You arrive on a mysterious island, seemingly inhabited solely by a team of scientists. Together, you need to unravel the mysteries of a civilisation from time immemorial, which suddenly and violently disappeared many, many years ago, in order to stop a hoary evil trying to quell the last remaining life on the island.

Explore the island's mysteries and a narrative delving into themes such as an original lore, ethics, friendship and betrayal. Visit us on Itch.io and Discord. Download a playable demo from GDrive below.

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Itch.io

Discord

In this project I am currently fulfilling the role of Programming Lead. I look over the coding concepts other programmers come up with and ensure a robust and future proof problem solving approach. Further I keep an overview of all the currently open tasks and distribute them amoung the members of the programming team. Lastly I specifically am responsible for developing our integration between Unreal and Articy, ensuring a smooth workflow for our designers and story writers to get story and dialogue they write into the game.

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Prism

Prism is a small horror first person shooter. The game was created during the first H-BRS GameJam and uploaded on itch.io. I contributed as a tools and game mechanics programmer, implementing for example the player behavior and tools for our Gamedesigner to place openable doors, trigger soundcues, etc. The game is available at:

Itch.io

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Avatar - Master of Elements

The game Avatar - Master of Elements is a VR 1 vs 1 multiplayer fighting game. It recognises the movement of the player using a Microsoft Kinect and executes different elemental attacks depending on this movement. I worked mainly on implementing tools to record ground truth data to match the players movement against, as well as on the multiplayer synchronization.

Using this game as a foundation, we also conducted a small reaserch study regarding user preference of UI in virtual reality. We compared a conventional HUD vs an intradiegetic approach. The results were published at the ICAT-EGVE as a poster submission. The Poster, a short and longer version of the research paper and a video showing the games functionality may be found here:

GDrive

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Wurfelgrauen

Wurfelgrauen is a small Rogue-like dungeon crawler based on randomness. The game was created during the GMTK22 and uploaded on itch.io. I contributed as a tools and game mechanics programmer, implementing for example the dice rolling mechanic and events based on the rolled number. The game is availeble at:

Itch.io

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VR & Therapy

In my previous job as a Scientific Assistant at Hochschule Bonn Rhein Sieg and in cooperation with the University Hospital Cologne, we were developing a VR therapy application. This application is meant for treatment of agoraphobia. I worked in the project as a tools and UI programmer. In this role I created tools to allow easy setup of driving routs for different kinds of vehicles, as well as tools to control the functionality of UI elements.

Because of the interesting implications of being able to treat phobias in VR, our team gave an interview for the General-Anzeiger Bonn:

GA Bonn

Since the online version is not visible for free you may find a pdf of the printed version here:

GDrive

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Laser Defender

Laser Defender is a game I created in my free time to improve my abilities as a game developer. It was part of an online course I followed to learn more about development in Unity. I spent a lot of time creating this and tried to polish it as much as I could.

The game is a simple 2D space invaders clone. However, it features the ability to play in local coop and also a vs mode. To test out the game download it here:

Itch.io

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Agents and Wardens

Agents and Wardens is a 1 vs 1 assymetric multiplayer game. It was created in a team of four for a masters course at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. One player controlls an agent in first person and has to steal secret documents and finally escape the facility. The other player plays the warden from a top down perspective. The warden can only interact with the world by giving orders to guards and by placing traps for the agent. While the agent tries to remain hidden, the warden must catch the agent.

In this project I worked mainly on the game mechanics, implementing the top down controller for the warden, as well as the alert system, which reacts to the agent making his presence known in some way to the warden. I also took over some parts in the multiplayer synchronization.

For further information read our developer diary or watch the explanatory video (only in German):

GDrive

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