Featured WIP · In Production · Mobile
DON'T BLINK
Role: Team Lead, Game Design, Marketing
DON'T BLINK OR THEY'LL COME FOR YOU
Our current project, DON’T BLINK, is a mobile top-down horror roguelike where monsters only move when the player blinks. This creates a constant tension between control and vulnerability, because the player is not only controlling the game, but also physically involved in the danger.
My Role
During the development of DON’T BLINK, I take on a combined lead and design role, shaping the game’s direction while guiding the team and production.
As the Project Lead, I set and guard the creative direction of the project, ensuring every feature supports our core pillars. I manage the planning and roadmap, divide tasks within the team, and keep priorities clear for each milestone, from the vertical slice to release. I organise playtests, translate feedback into actionable improvements, and review builds to maintain quality before every showcase.
As a Game Designer, I shape the game flow, learning curve, and overall systems. I work on level and monster design, and I developed the progression systems including coins, diamonds, leveling, and reward structures.
On the Marketing side, I experimented with early promotional materials such as posters and the project’s website to test how we present the game’s identity.
Hi, my name is Joshua Bastiaans, a game designer with a focus on experimental interaction design.
I'm creating experiences that use unconventional inputs, from blink detection to physical controllers and audio-only gameplay. By moving beyond traditional controllers, I aim to make interactions feel more intuitive, playful, and immersive.
Another passion of mine is exploring the surreal and the psychedelic. I like to create experiences that transport players to places that feel impossible in everyday life, worlds that bend perception, emotion, and reality.
School project · Client work · Physical project
Madurodam Fireboat
Role: Gameplay Systems, Physical Controller Design
Extinguish the fires on the cargo ship before it sinks!
This school project stood out because it was developed directly for a real client, the park Madurodam, a miniature theme park dedicated to recreating the Netherlands at scale.
Our challenge was to redesign one of the park’s most iconic attractions, the fireboat, while modernizing outdated interaction and feedback systems.
Project Overview
In this experience, players step into the role of a fireboat operator, grabbing the fire hose to put out fires on a burning cargo ship before it sinks beneath the waves.
We built a functional proof of concept used to validate gameplay and interaction, serving as the foundation for final fabrication by the attraction’s future manufacturers.
My Role
In this project was responsible for creating the systems behind the actual gameplay as well as designing the physical controller.
I divided the main system of the boat catching on fire in 3 rounds to accommodate for the right amount of challenge and lead time of the interaction. The system looks at the performance and speed of the last round to decide the difficulty of the next round so the player always gets challenged without it feeling impossible.
What drove me most was fixing what the original lacked: real impact-feedback. We studied real fireboat hose systems to understand movement, pressure, stance, and control, then redesigned the entire controller into something intuitive, inviting, and comfortable to use.
3D printing in combination with arduino’s and simple electronics allowed us to quickly test and iterate on the design. The result is a remix of the classic attraction, built to finally let players feel like they’re actually putting out the fire.
Abyssal Voyage
A deeper reality
“Can you reach a psychedelic state without using psychedelics?” was the question we asked ourselves at the beginning of the project. This phenomena is already widely explored in a multitude of ways like breathwork or sensory deprivation. We wanted to know if this was also possible by playing a game, or rather, experiencing a game.
Overview
Deep underground in an ancient temple you try to find a deeper version of yourself. To mimic an actual psychedelic trip we split the experience into 3 parts, each elevating the trippyness with their own mechanic. To get to a deeper level you have to explore the temple to find the “inner light”.
Role
A psychedelic experience is very personal and so the experience we created leaves a lot of room for your own interpretation. My main responsibility was designing how the experience communicates without explaining itself. I did this by creating simple objectives that encourage the player to explore this surreal world, while having a very minimalistic UI so the player can get fully immersed.
Active Position · Python Tool Development · Visual Design
Heerema
Role: Blender Tools, Pipelines, Visualization
Developing Blender tools and pipelines to optimize creative workflows.
With Blender’s rapid growth, I’m driving its adoption inside Heerema’s Visualization Team. Coming from 3DS Max with a large library of custom scripts and add-ons, I’m rebuilding that functionality in Blender so the team can transition smoothly without losing speed or quality.
Project Overview
Over the span of 2 years I’ve created a multitude of tools, from which I will highlight the two most interesting.
The first one, Crane Controller is an addon that lets you control and animate the vessel’s cranes easily. You have the ability to either animate from the scene controller, which is handy for quickly animating and picking up objects. The other way is from the UI, which lets you set precise angles for more technical animations.
The second project is the Monopile Generator. This one is based on Blender’s Geometry Node System, which allows for quick and iterative development. At first this project itself wasn’t used a lot in our design team but did spark a new project, AWP (Automated Work Pack) , which took this concept to the next level. AWP created an automated workspace for large-scale projects, for example Empire Wind, which required the installation of more than hundred wind turbines. Each turbine could automatically be initialized and generated based on client drawings.
Impact
In the end, this workflow saved us a lot of setup time and raised the bar for how we tackle complex offshore installations. It started as a small experiment, but grew into a tool that genuinely reshaped our day-to-day work.
VR Project · Game Design
Lost In The Woods
Role: Game Design, Sound Design
A game without vision
“How do you design a game using only sound as feedback?” That question, posed during the Sound, Games & Interaction module, opened my eyes to an entirely new space of accessible game design. It made me realise how rich and immersive a game can be when built for players who are blind or visually impaired, and how much creativity emerges when you remove vision from the equation.
Overview
We decided to step outside our comfort zone and chase an idea that was a little less conventional: building the entire project in VR. That choice opened up a lot more creative freedom. It let us keep the game accessible to everyone while also making sure every player had the exact same experience—no one could see anything outside the headset, which we turned into a narrative strength rather than a limitation.
In the game, your goal is to rescue a missing girl in a dark, overgrown forest. But you’re not alone there. A sound-sensitive creature roams the woods, making every move toward the child a careful balance between urgency and silence. No one ever saw this monster because no one survived to tell the tale, which is why you go in blindfolded.
Role
My role in this project was mainly to design an interesting, intuitive challenge that fit the narrative. I focused on creating sound-based interactions, like branches and leaves the player could accidentally step on. These subtle cues alerted the monster, forcing the player to freeze on the spot and think carefully about every step.