Jack Ballard

Games Programing Student

jacksballard@gmail.com

Hi There

I'm Jack - a Gamer, TTRPG partaker, an enthusiest for the works of Brandon Sanderson and Sam Lake, 3D modeler, and a Student for Games Programing.

This page is a collection of "things I've made" relating to game dev, wich unfortuneatly discounts my minecraft projects despite the time I put into them.

Graphics Programing

This was a uni project as part of my graphics programing module where I created a rendering pipeline. It heavily utilised openGL to draw objects, and was a great learning experiance how programs interact with the GPU.

Key features of this project include: Animation, Lighting, a Scenegraph, and lots of primitives..

"Bubbles!"

This game was put together as part of a game jam, and was my first foray into the 3D side of godot, although mechanically it's just a 2D side scroller. This was a great excuse to learn about godots ability to work with blender. Though simpler in design than scope of our previous projects, we didn't let scope creep get the better of us and developed something close to our original pitch.

Bubbles Gif

Fossile Fule Flood

This was my first game jam (three thing game), and return to Monogame since Collage. It's a platformer, with proceduarly generating platforms, complete with coins and powerups. You have to do everything yourself with Monogame, and while that made us work slower than we would have with a game engine, theres a certain satisfaction to knowing you built it yourself and that every problem is entirely your fault and within your control to fix. I prefer working in Monogame to Godot, but it is considerably more limmited in what you can make in the same amount of time, granted you don't have a backlog of games by which to draw on for plug and play components.

Fossile Image

Subzero Salvage

This was my first foray into Godot as a whole. My group decided we wanted a top down collector game where you would go out, collect gems to gather upgrades so you could venture further each day to collect parts to eventualy repair your ship. We learnt alot on this game, some of Godot, but mostly about scope creep and setting realistic expectations.

I'm glad that we did manage to get in some rudimentary AI to fire at the player, a working shop and day timer, and collectable items. Although I can't take credit for the assets on this project, I think visually it came out rather well, being remenicent of old jrpgs and pokemon games.

Subzero Image