My Game Design Portfolio

My Game Design Portfolio - Jack Granger

My name is Jack Granger and I’m a games design student living in Coventry in the UK. I am currently studying a Level 3 BTEC course in Games Design at Coventry College and have been studying for three years. In the time I have been learning there, I have become more and more confident in using software such as Pro Motion, Maya and Unreal Engine. In the time I have been using these programs, I have gained knowledge in skills such as 3D modelling and gameplay creation.

In my spare time, I like to create lists as well as write down a few game ideas and narratives on my phone and like to be organised and consistent with what I type. I have a Grade 4 in GCSE English and I am currently looking towards being a script or story writer within the video game industry in the future. I occasionally write my own stories and scripts for fun using Dreamily or Celtx without the assistance of AI. Because of this, I feel like I am more suited to a job role involving narratives.

So far, I have designed two 2D game prototypes using the three software apps I have mentioned…

H. Laser, a 2D run ‘n gun platformer where you control a superhero who shoots lasers from his hands. Life In Space, a 2D space simulation. Alongside these 2D prototypes I have also created a 3D endless runner prototype and a 3D platformer prototype using the tools in both Maya and Unreal. I have also created narratives for a few game ideas of mine. The first idea I had was Excalibur of Thunder, a historical sci-fi themed beat ‘em up inspired by Capcom’s Knights of The Round and SEGA's Golden Axe series set in Medieval England where the player controls one of four knights on a quest for a lightning-blasting sword to prevent an alien invasion with. The alien invasion premise being inspired by another classic 2D beat 'em up, SEGA's Alien Storm. The second idea I had was a post-apocalyptic open-world third-person action-adventure game set in a half-ruined, mutant-infested alternative of Coventry called Radioactivity. I'd say that Bethesda's Fallout series was probably the biggest form of inspiration for this game idea.

But all of these ideas used and all of these prototypes created were for tasks set by my college lecturers, beyond that I have thought up a few other game ideas of my own. Though there are plenty of modern games that I love dearly, there are plenty of retro games I love also. And it’s because of my big appreciation towards retro games that I’ve had a few ideas over the years for retro-game compilations as well as a few original 2D platformer and shoot ‘em up ideas of my own.

One of these ideas was a World War II themed 2D horizontal shoot ‘em up inspired by Toaplan's Fire Shark and Capcom’s 194X series (despite these two being vertical shoot 'em ups) with a 16-bit art-style called Spitfires And Messerschmidts. Another similar idea I had was a vertical space shoot ‘em up called Solar Squad. I took inspiration from classic vertical shoot ‘em ups like Tecmo's Star Force series and Toaplan's Truxton for this game idea. I had another idea for these two games in particular to be not just shoot ‘em ups but also have levels where the gameplay style changes to either platform or rail shooter. I was planning to have the rail shooter stages use "super-scaling technology similar to SEGA's Galaxy Force. The first game idea I thought out before either Solar Squad or Spitfires And Messerschmidts came to mind was a 2D side-scrolling beat ‘em up named Zombietown. I had an idea for this to be a super gory 8-bit beat ‘em up with a simple gameplay style similar to the likes of very early beat 'em ups such as Namco's Splatterhouse series, Irem's Kung Fu Master or SEGA's Black Belt (called Fist of the North Star in Japan), as well as employing similar scrolling techniques to the ones used in those three games.

I wrote a narrative review of Resident Evil 4 where I write about the strengths and weaknesses of the game's narrative. The link is just down below.

file:///D:/Resident%20Evil%204%20Narrative%20Review.docx

I generated two radar graphs to display how confident I am in both the soft and hard skills I possess.

This image depicts the amount frames needed to animate Moe, an astronaut character I helped create for a 2D space simulation prototype called Life In Space. The frames on the left and right ends of the image show the idle animation while the frames in the middle show the picking up animation. I uploaded these to ArtStation.

This is a laser shotgun I modelled from scratch in Maya and uploaded to Sketchfab. I added a trigger as well as a scope. This was going to be one of the "futuristic" weapons equipped by a few of the aliens in Excalibur of Thunder.