StarCitizen:Lars den Herder

Lars den Herder

Lars den Herder is Systems Designer III on the Mission Feature Team (MFT) for StarCitizen:Star Citizen at Cloud Imperium Games.<ref>Inside Star Citizen: Mission: Cognoscible, YouTube, 21 Jun 2023</ref>

Work at CIG

Lars started as a Systems Designer II,<ref name=":0">Inside Star Citizen: Doing Time | Summer 2022, YouTube, 18 Aug 2022</ref> before becoming Systems Designer III in July 2023.<ref>Lars' LinkedIn</ref>

Lars' first work as part of MFT was to revamp the in-game location of StarCitizen:Security Post Kareah,<ref name=":0" /> adding NPC guards and detectives that were patrolling around, additional airspace turrets, a new gameplay loop to retrieve contraband from the evidence lockup, and a countermission sending bounty hunters and mercenaries to retake Security Post Kareah from any illegal and hostile players within. Additionally, this change saw the removal of all other StarCitizen:Imperial Criminal Database locations in Stanton.

Following the release of Security Post Kareah, Lars made the salvage rights missions for the then newly released StarCitizen:Salvage gameplay mechanic.<ref name=":1">Inside Star Citizen: Mission to Module, YouTube, 16 Mar 2023</ref> This allowed players to purchase salvage rights from providers, and hull scrape the ship, as well as possibly find commodities in the cargo holds.

Early Life

Lars started playing games at an early age, starting with a Game Boy Color. As he grew up, he owned a variety of consoles with his brothers, before owning his own Xbox 360 and starting his own library of games. He specialised in secondary school to a Computer Science direction, taking Mathematics, Physics, and IT as courses for his A-Level diploma.

He then studied two years of Computer Science at the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands, before changing to a Bachelor of Science in International Game Architecture and Design (IGAD) at NHTV University of Applied Sciences. It is there that he specialised in technical game design with C# scripting in the Unity game engine, and Unreal Blueprints in Unreal Engine 4. He made several student projects, including an Assassin's Creed VR escape room, in collaboration with Ubisoft. He also participated in various Global Game Jams, where in one of them he made a potion brewing game using the Razer Hydra motion controller.

After completing his Bachelor's Degree, he continued his internship with Slightly Mad Studios working on Fast & Furious Crossroads for six months, before searching for a full time position and relocating to the United Kingdom to work at Electric Square.

Other Works

His extended internship with Slightly Mad Studios culminated in the release of Fast & Furious Crossroads, a car based story and multiplayer game.

When working for Electric Square, he worked on Detonation Racing, a spiritual successor to Split/Second, for Apple Arcade, before being assigned to Assassin's Creed Nexus VR, which he worked on for 20 months, before applying for the job of Systems Designer at CIG.

Trivia

Lars' in-game handle is Spectre-CIG.
Lars coined the term "Hex Penetrator", an anagram of "Pre XenoThreat" that refers to the StarCitizen:Overdrive Initiative event.<ref>Inside Star Citizen: Initiative Indicative on YouTube</ref>

References