A playable demo of my game is available now to showcase my progress so far. Go here to download it!
A playable demo of my game is available now to showcase my progress so far. Go here to download it!
Hello there! My name is Austin Bunker and I am an aspiring game developer currently attending Full Sail University for my Bachelor's in Game Development. I have been designing video games since I was six starting on an engine called FPS Creator; one of the most basic engines available. I tinkered and started messing around with web development and my skills grew much stronger than before, eventually leading me into the Unreal Engine where I call home now! I absolutely adore creating games and it is what I will do with my life forever! I am currently working on three smaller projects in my free time, this website, my college, and my skills as a developer. It is a journey that never ends and only gets more interesting the more you know, that is why I love this career path so much. I crave being able to learn new things, update my knowledge, and work with others to help update them on a constantly changing environment.
I am creating this website as a portfolio and showcase to potential employers, people who are interested, teachers checking in my work, and anyone else who cares to give me feedback or learn a bit about me. Please feel free to send me an email at letschat@austinsbunker.com with any comments, feedback, or summaries on any of my work that I post; it is appreciated and helps in making me a batter developer by showing me what everyone thinks, not just me. I am programming this website, and it is currently still in progress, so I apologize for any impurities throughout! I decided to program it rather than use a framework because it shows my skills and personality in a much more customized and observable method. Please look over my Blog page to see all my updates for everything from school projects to side projects, see how my brain breaks down aspects of game development, and even see my progress from the start of my college career through the end once I graduate.
The main goal of this website is to give insights to those looking into how I work, how I am to work with, what my strengths and weaknesses are, how I work with others and interact with my peers and show all of my forms of social media to connect on!
My projects page contains all of the screen shots, videos, game play, and all other coverage of my current and past projects. Whether they are actual playable builds or just pictures. Please note that a playable game will be uploaded for potential employers. I truly appreciate you taking the time out of your day to learn a bit about me, and please feel free to visit again to see what updates I come out with! If you are an employer and potentially interested in me, please take a moment to scroll down and read a little bit more in depth about me, my history with videos games, and where I will be in the future!
I started my interest in video games when I was young, my mom bought my sister and I an Xbox for Christmas and Grand Theft Auto III (little did she know what it even was). From there, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends all started gaming as well. This led to my friends and I getting in groups and talking about video games. The very first thing I did was when I was 5, I started drawing guns in a first-person prospective, then doing full sized flip books around them. I even got a paper taken from me in 4th grade by my teacher Mrs. Gillespie, then yelled at about not drawing guns (that do not exist and were poor custom weapons) and gun fights with aliens when waiting for other students to finish testing.
At age six, I found some software by the name of FPS Creator. This software was simple drag and drop, and only had a slight feature of adding your own LUA code, but you could make cool games with a lot of work. I followed a man called Lee Bamber, who created and still creates the latest version of the software. It is designed as an intro into larger scale engines like Unity, Unreal Engine, CryEngine, and so many more. My specialty as a kid was horror/zombie/survival games. I started by placing some ground tiles that were simple concrete, and a bunch of what I thought were friendly troops (they were enemies). I hit the RUN button and instantly got pummeled by a rain of bullets. As I grew I could recreate (not perfectly by any means) levels from other games and make my own levels, I started messing around with the audio system and the scripts I could run and find on the forums. I realized that I could actually do this, and I wouldn’t ask when it would end, I would get excited to do it every second of every day.
Years went on and I kept making games with that engine [FPS Creator], and some of my friends started getting into web development on platforms such as Wix, Weebly, and Yola, so I started with Yola! It had a tool within the framework to edit very limited code (HTML, CSS, and very little jQuery) of the theme. I created a website for people to play games at school and work and my friends loved it! Over the course of fine tuning the code made by Yola, I was able to start Hosting my websites rather than using Frameworks. My uncle bought me the name GameShank.com when I went with my dad to see what was going to be our new house in West Virginia. I began programming [GameShank] and learned HTML, CSS, jQuery, SQL, PHP, a little bit of JavaScript, Ruby, RoR, Zombie Ruby, and some random tid-bits here and there of other languages. I managed to get into the top 2% of websites in the world (According to Alexa before it became a corporate SEO and networking tool and was a list of websites, their ranks, and their traffic info for the public) as a fourteen year old and was pretty proud!
At about seventeen, I found the Unreal Engine in the early 4.2.0 stages (I had messed around with the free version of UE3 prior, but had not had sufficient knowledge to understand it), and I was able to take the skills I learned in programming, and the skills I learned in the FPS Creator engine, and began my never ending journey into game design with Unreal Engine. I am willing to learn anything and everything, but I have been using the Unreal Engine to create my projects ever since, as I find it to be extremely fluid, easy to understand with the strong community and assets! My current projects are on halt because I just started college, actually, the day before writing this; but I was working on a tower defense first person shooter round survival game, a gravity defying super hero game with some of the Paragon assets recently released in the marketplace with large scale city maps, and one that is a large open world zombie survival looting quest driven adventure game. They all have cool features ranging from attachments, camouflages, day-night cycles that match real life, fully upgradable weapons in every way with elemental damage and fatal/critical blows, different physics than each other, and so much more. My biggest downfall is that I am no artist, and I cannot model or create a drawing, but I can take that model and make it playable with mechanics, menus, worlds, and about anything else. I am delving into animations, and [in UE4] animation blueprints and am making a ton of progress. I am not yet comfortable enough with animation, thought, to list it as a strong point.
Now you know a little bit about me, how about we chat! Tell me what you think of any of the projects I have listed, comment, compliment, or give feedback on anything you see on the site! I really appreciate you taking the time to read over my brief video game history overview, and I hope it helps you understand a little bit about me as a game developer, a person, a student, and a peer. I plan to join a team or create a team that sparks a revolution in the gaming community, a team that changes everything. I am currently attending Full Sail University until 04-06/2020 but am more than willing to take any opportunity that I can to learn, experience, and network. I am excited to get into the industry, and I will see you out there!