Tove Laursen

WELCOME!

2025-05-10 Hi, thank you for visiting my portfolio!

Feel free to look around, but as you can probably see there's not a lot going on here :( That's because it's currently under constructionPlease swing by in a month or so for a new and improved version. In the meantime you're more than welcome to check out my social platforms or just send me an email, my about page is just about done so you can find some more information thereAll the best, Tove <3

SPECIALIZATION

My second year specialization projects. A UI-editor where you can create menus and a model viewer where you can preview 3D-models and textures. Both created for our custom built game engine.

GAMES

A selection of games I've worked on. Most of them are made as projects from my time at The Game Assembly, press the image to read more about my contributions

DEVLOG

As soon as this homepage is done, my next plan is to expand my knowledge even further while working in Unity. I plan to do this with a fun little 2D game, the details are not fully fleshed out yet but I have a general idea of what I want to make.

I find that this kind of side project is a very motivating way to not only dig deeper into areas that you love, but also expanding on areas you haven't paid as much attention to before. Writing things down and reflecting on what I've learned helps things stick to my brain, so why not write a devlog while I'm at it :)

ABOUT ME

Hi! I'm Tove – a game programmer from Stockholm, Sweden. Currently working at Wishfully in Gothenburg.

I recently graduated from The Game Assembly (TGA), where I spent two intense but rewarding years learning the ins and outs of game programming through hands-on projects and close collaboration with artists, level designers, and other programmers. You can see some of the projects I've worked on here.Before that, I worked in retail as a Store Controller – a role that combined planning, coordination, and leadership. That experience taught me the value of good teamwork and clear communication, something I’ve brought with me into game development.Whether it’s working with gameplay features, creating helpful tools, solving tricky bugs, or planning the next sprint, I’m always up for the challenge.

• Resumé
• Email
• LinkedIn

If you want to get in touch with me, please feel free to send me an email (tovelaursen@hotmail.com) or contact me on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear from you! :)

GOALS

MOTIVATION
While we were working on our custom game engine, our graphic designers needed a more efficient way to confirm assets created for the game. I saw an opportunity to create a modelviewer, in which they can preview their models as they will be rendered in game.

PROCESS
I made the modelviewer into it’s own program, to keep it as contained as possible. Next I added the floor, gizmo, and a simple menu using Dear ImGui.The drag & drop function was implemented together with a observer pattern, sending a filepath to the main program where the mesh will be loaded and displayed onto the viewport. I had to rewrite some parts of the engine’s mesh import pipeline to make it work.

FINAL THOUGHTS
This was a very fun tool to make! As our engine progressed I kept making updates to it to make sure the graphics were up-to-date, and it was always fun to revisit.Two things I would’ve added if I have had more time is to be able to change the pixel shader in runtime and to preview different animations.

GOALS

MOTIVATION
The idea of making a menu editor was born during the creation of the second game project me and my team made using our own engine.In our previous projects, our graphic designers haven’t had a lot of control over the UI elements in the game. They had all the assets ready but due to time constraints and prioritization, implementation of the UI was usually rushed by the end of the project. I wanted to give our graphic designers an honest chance to put everything together themselves without having to look over my shoulder.

THE COMPONENT SYSTEM
We were using a ECS in our engine, but due to difficulties handling events and rendering order in our ECS I decided to create my own Component System for the UI elements. This suits our game's simple UI better, and I thought it would be a fun challenge.You can view the full Component System and other classes I've used here, the following code snippets has been edited to fit the page better.

MenuObject
This is the base that holds all the components. The decision to call it MenuObject was based on the fact that this system will only be used for the menu, since we were using an ECS for the rest of the game. You can view the full code here and here.

MenuComponent
The base class for all the different components. You can view the full code here.

The Components
You can view all the components here, I'll just write a little breakdown of what I had the time to add during this project.

IMPROVEMENTS
Due to time constraints there is a lot to be improved with this editor. One thing I'm very pleased with is that since my first goal was to make it work, I was able to test my program on our graphic designers during development and receive feedback on the user-friendlyness of it all. I did make this editor for them after all.I never got to the optimization part of the process. I think not optimizing the Editor is fine, this was not being used in game and since it was still quite small it ran just fine. The parts of the program that was being used in the game though could've been optimized quite a bit, but our menus are still quite small with no advanced inventory systems so I think this was good enough for us.Another thing that would be a huge improvement was to have sliders. What I wanted was to sort of “animate” the sprite with a "InteractableComponent", for example a slider that has a grab and a fill area should react when changing the value. This was easier in theory than the actual implementation, and I think at the time I started working on this functionality it was already too late in the process and I ended up rushing it which usually doesn't turn out great. We ended up with a different solution for our game, with +/- buttons instead which worked just as fine.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Although there’s still room for improvement, the editor gets the job done and it was used (by someone other than me) to create the menus for one of our games! In the planning process I was definitely guilty of “over engineering”, and got a little carried away at times adding features that might not even end up being used. All in all, I’m very happy with how the editor turned out! I had fun making it, and I’m looking forward to more projects like this.

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Video of my teammate David using the Editor and Visual Scripting tools I developed