In Short

The name is Nina Buurman, nicknamed Alex. Currently I study Game Design at the HKU in the Netherlands with a focus on narrative design and user experience.

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Highlighted Projects

TACTOLOGY LAB

In 2026 I was a participant of TACTOLOGY LAB: "a multiple-day structured program that brings artists and creators together to explore new ways of (tactile) interaction with electronics."

Together with Katarina Kadijevic and Niek van der Veer I created the entity is sleeping, the people are the dream, a performance about connection with the non-human.

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Puzzle Controller using Arduino

For this group project we made a controller that the player puzzles together while playing the game. Players have full control over what actions are on the controller and where they are placed, but they have to make choices: not all buttons fit at the same time.

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Lumen - A 2D Platformer With A Neon Look

Lumen is simple and short 2D platformer that I worked on together with pixel artist @pxl.squeeler.The focus for this game was on game feel and level design

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• Play Game

Adapt - A Board Game about Aliens

In this co-op boardgame you play as a group of shapeshifting aliens that have crashed on earth. You are trying to rebuild your spacecraft while keeping humans in the dark about your presence.

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Sculpting The Future - An Applied Game for Impactmakers

Sculpting the future is an applied game about changing the world as an artist. It was made for Impactmakers and is based on the nine dimensions of their Creatures Framework.I was the writer for the game!

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Project Gallery

About Me

I think of myself as a designer of interactive experiences, but even more so as a storyteller. I try to tell stories with my work, and to get people to reflect on them.My interests lie in the space between games and art, where multiple disciplines come together to support the core idea of a work. Finding out what media fit a project is part of my process.I am currently in a gap year between my 2nd and 3rd year at HKU Game Design in the Netherlands, focusing on developing myself as an artist, storyteller and as a person.Curious about what I have done this year? Check out TACTOLOGY LAB, or take a peek at my LinkedIn.

• E-mail
• LinkedIn
• Itch

Zappo is a little bit shy. If you pet her on the head, she tends to hide behind her wings!

However, if you give her some space, she quickly recovers her confidence and engages in her favourite pasttime: dancing to metal music.

Zappo was lovingly constructed in two weeks by Julianne Jonkers, Floor van Lieren, Sytsejan Vledder and me for the Seminar Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? given by Hazal Ates.

Workings:
Zappo has three servo motors moving the wings and head, and a light-sensitive resistor that detects your hand. She also has two LEDs as eyes that extinguish when she's shy.

My role:
I was involved in every aspect of the process. From coding to crafting the shape of the wings.As I was one of two people who had previous experience with Arduino I was mostly working on the wiring and code.

Sculpting The Future - A project for Impactmakers

Sculpting the future is an applied game about changing the world as an artist. It was made for Impactmakers and is based on the nine dimensions of their Creatures Framework.

I was the writer on this project!

Download the game HERE

The game is about a town that has just lost their town statue. It is your job to make a new one by assembling items that you gather in the town. The choices you make influence what changes happen in the town, and what dimensions you get recommended at the end.

This game was made with 8 people over the course of 8 weeks. You can find the work of my fellow game devs below:

Dion Atsma
Ralph Burgers
Ethan van Hasselt
Jae van den Heuvel
Martha Ludwig
Elias Malinovskaya
Lex Vermeulen

My Role - Dialogue

My role in the project was everything dialogue related. This meant that I both set up the dialogue plugin we used and wrote the dialogue itself.I also worked closely together with Dion and Ethan, the developer and other designer.

Yarn Spinner

We worked with the Yarn Spinner plugin for Unity. At it's core it is pretty basic so I wrote some custom scripts for it. For example the portraits that pop up as NPC's talk are prompted through the Yarn dialogue script thanks to a custom function.After everything was set up I wrote all the dialogue for the 9 NPC's in the game, plus some separate events.

A Fun Challenge

Most of the games' core ideas are communicated through dialogue. I found it an incredibly fun challenge to balance getting those ideas in and avoid being on the nose.That said, huge credit to Lex for designing such wonderful NPC's, because I did not have to put a lot of effort into creating their personalities. Those were already there.

Lumen - A platformer with a focus on game feel

Lumen is simple and short 2D platformer that I made for the course Game Feel and continued to work on until I had a polished demo of +/- 10 minutes. It has a neon-look and momentum based movement.For the project I worked together with pixel artist @pxl.squeeler, who made all the visuals.

Play the game HERE

The process of making Lumen can be seperated into 4 parts. I tried to make each part feel as good as possible before moving on to the next.The 4 parts have their own itch page and can be played in a browser:- basic movement
- adding a mechanic & improving on it
- level design
- visuals

The visuals were a challenge to get right.A lot of work went into creating good foreground / background separation, and communicating to the player what elements could be interacted with.Making this game has made me realise how useful it is to make prototypes with very simple art at first, and get the mechanics right before the visuals.

The neighbours kid made this drawing for my grandfather. The drawing has a certain something to it that I cannot explain. It just wanted to move.

Bram's drawing

Automatons - something I've been dabbling in

Automatons are a fascination of mine. As are animatronics, but there is a kind of magic in making things move by purely mechanical means.My few attempts at making my own automatons have not been very successful so far - there is always something that doesn't quite work in the way I want it to - but I am determined to keep experimenting.

I made this mechanism (and the casing it belongs to) as a gift for my father. It is a reference to the Timelords song Doctorin' the tardis, which is itself a reference to the show Docter Who.In the music video the Daleks can be seen rolling around on wheels. But an observant viewer might spot a pair of shoes walking at 1:57.Once again the prototype was a bit of a dud. The cardboard legs have too much friction with the wood and not enough weight to compensate. Still, I learnt some new things about transferring movement and the project brought a lot of joy!

Moving On - A Game About Moving (group project)

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• Itch link! (not functional yet)

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Trailer

Unfortunately I used copyrighted images for the game and the trailer. I hope to change this if I ever make a next iteration.

Adapt - A Board Game About Aliens

Adapt is a co-op board game where you play as a group of shapeshifting aliens that is stranded on earth. You are trying to rebuild your spacecraft while keeping humans in the dark about your presence.

Below you will find the game's rules, the challenges I ran into while making the game and the iterations that resulted, as well as the storyboard I made for the trailer of the game.

Trailer

Puzzle Controller using Arduino (group project)

For this project we made a controller that the player will puzzle together while playing the game. Players have full control over what actions are on the controller and where they are placed, but they have to make choices: not all buttons fit at the same time.

Our team worked on this controller for 4 weeks for project "Hybrid". A project about combining the digital and physical world.Ben Rosenmöller and I were in charge of the physical part, which I will be sharing the design process of below. I designed the casing and buttons, Ben did the coding. We worked closely together on the electronics.The other members of the team were Dominique van de Fliert, Erik van der Meer, and Cas Willink. If you want to know more about the digital part of the project I would reccomend checking out their sites:

Dominique van de Fliert - Erik van der Meer - Ben Rosenmöller - Cas Wellink

"PULSE" installation

PULSE is a small installation where a mechanical heart reacts to the heartbeat of the user.

video's of the process ->

Fire Spirits (entry for the Playgrounds x Sound&Vision contest)

"They might seem joyous and playful, but do not underestimate a fire spirit. They are unpredictable and oblivious to the damage they cause. Worst of all: Where there is one, there is bound to be more."

For the contest Sound&Vision provided images from their archive to place "dark fantasy" themed character designs in. You can find more information on the playgrounds website:

• https://weareplaygrounds.nl/slot/sound-vision-3/

I used three of these images to create a collage and drew the fire spirits over the top. The fire effect was also done using the archive materials.
Below you can find some of the process and other explorations I did for the contest.

Fire Spirits (entry for the Playgrounds x Sound&Vision contest)

"They might seem joyous and playful, but do not underestimate a fire spirit. They are unpredictable and oblivious to the damage they cause. Worst of all: Where there is one, there is bound to be more."

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