John Gerken
Gameplay Programmer & Tools Engineer
About Me
I am a Gameplay Programmer with several years of experience in C# (mostly in college courses). I have worked mostly in Unity, but have some experience in UE4. I also have experience with HTML, CSS, Javascript, Python, and others; however, I am never opposed to learning something new. (or refreshing my knowledge on something old)
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(Click "About Me" in the menu at the top of the page for more details)
Education
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Wake Technical Community College
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Graduated with Associates in Applied Science​ in Simulation and Game Development (SGD)
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Concentration in Programming
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Certificates in:
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SGD: Business
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SGD: Fundamentals I
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SGD: Fundamentals II
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SGD: Mobile Game Development
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SGD: Programming
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SGD: Quality Assurance
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Current and Past Projects
(See Info Text Area at bottom of page)
Infinite "Volunteer"
(Capstone Project)
Fantasy Quest Info
This is the final project from my Software Engineering class. For this project, I did almost all of the level design, as well as finding (and editing as needed) all the tilemap sprites. I also programmed all of the players interactions
Infinite "Volunteer"
This is the project I did for my capstone. It is a 3rd person skill/puzzle/platformer game about a cube-shaped robot who is trying to escape a testing facility. The primary game mechanic is that the player bot has to hit traps, respawn, and then use their dead body from the previous attempt to get past the trap and continue in the level. I think that this is a semi-unique concept because I was only able to find 1 other game with a similar mechanic and it was an old, 2D platformer Flash game.
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For this project, I was the Team Lead, Lead Programmer, and Lead Designer. I also made all the special effects, did most of the UX Design, and did all the Technical Art/Tools Programming. In addition, I played the role of the generalist, filling in gaps as needed.
List 2D Classes
I noticed that, in the Unity Inspector, you are unable to view arrays/lists with 2 or more dimensions, however, you are able to view classes and all their properties. I used this to make a bunch of 2D array classes (one each for pretty much every data type, plus the "object" class as a backup and catch-all) so that, now you can make a list of this class for the data type you need and have it be viewable in the inspector. (presuming your variable is public or serializable private)
Jumpy Street Info
This is another project that I worked on in my Software Engineering class. This project is supposed to be a recreation of the popular mobile game, Crossy Road. In this project, I did almost all the programming (except for the procedural terrain generation). I also made and textured all the 3D models, because the ones we were given were not very good.
Model Import Formatter Info
This is a tool for the Unity Editor. At the time that I made this, I thought that, if you imported multiple models into Unity and wanted to change their import settings, you had to do it one model at a time. (I have since found out that this is incorrect.) This tool is intended to allow you to import multiple models at once with custom import settings.
Help
Click the buttons beside each of the files listed here to toggle info about the file or to download it. See the pages under the "Videos" tab above for short clips of the things in action.