Jordan Walsh - Bourban.co.uk

Hello there! I'm Jordan Walsh; Programmer at Red Kite Games with ~5 years of professional programming experience, having worked in both Unity and Unreal Engine extensively on titles including Fall Guys and Redacted, the next entry in a beloved AAA FPS IP. While working on these titles, I've worked on console-specific features for both PS5 and Nintendo Switch, made tools for artists, worked with multi-discipline teams to prototype, implement and iterate gameplay features, profiling and optimisation, and plenty more.

If you'd like to look at some of my work you can find my latest side project just below or several of my older projects on the Projects page.

Latest Project

My latest side project, a blacksmithing sim game I've been referring to as Dieselsmith (owing to the Mad Max-esque Dieselpunk theme) spawned from an idea I had to use a combination of Blend Shapes and vertex shading to let players forge unique-looking items at runtime. I started prototyping this mechanic and it quickly spiralled into a whole game idea involving Overcooked/Papers, Please style time management and a variety of crafting minigames.

I am still actively working on the game - if a little slowly - and since it's more of a hobby game, I don't have much of a concrete plan for its future, and I develop as I go, usually working on features or functionality in bursts when I get struck with inspiration; Does a game this early in development need a little animated hammer on the workbench? No, but I'd just discovered how awesome DOTween is, and suddenly found myself using it for everything. Similarly, there's some cool dynamic materials in there, since I wanted to practice using Unity's shader graph, even though the character controller, for instance, is as barebones as it can get and still be funcitonal.

Showcase

Fall Guys is a game that needs no introduction from me -- I worked on several areas of the game including profiling and optimisation, a custom character LOD system, complete with custom tools for artists to generate prefabs compatible with the system, platform specific features including a party system for the Switch, integration of the game's In-App purchases with the Nintendo eShop and the integration of the EOS plugin, allowing crossplay across all platforms.

Paperbound is a cutesy puzzle platformer developed by a multi-discipline team of 13 over the course of 3-4 months. The game was developed in Unity and I worked mostly on the menu system, UI and dialogue system. During development we had regular meetings with our client, who'd give us feedback and we would make iterations based on their feedback and our own playtesting, leading to a lovely - if short - platformer.

The Big Up, a project I worked on at Abertay, is a 2D brawler/defense game created in Unity/C# by a team of 4, including myself as the only programmer, though I did also create animations, a small amount of the art and also contributed a fair amount to the game's design, including the initial idea and several of the major mechanics.

Older Projects

Untitled VR RTS (Or, VRTS, if you will) Game. I created the bones of a minimalistic RTS game for VR devices, I planned to have the 'game' be a table-top strategy game which the player can navigate around and play in VR, a little bit like Tabletop Simulator, but with interactive game pieces. The player can play by choosing a building to place from the side bar and pointing to the desired location to build it. An example of this building system can be seen in the video below (albeit recorded with mouse input):

As Yet Untitled Platformer (GitHub repo): I have been working on a 2D platformer in C++/SFML along with artist Rachael Lampard-France, Who has provided the background art in the below video and is working on player sprites and UI elements, which can be seen here. So far I have implemented the character's movement and physics logic, an animation system, a dynamic spawning system for projectiles, along with the projectile fucntionality itself as well as a UI component of the player class. Additionally, the game's screen/level system is implemented allowing me to quickly create additional levels and connect them together.

Contact

If you'd like to contact me feel free to send me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Why Bourban? Is it 'cause I like biscuits and whisky but can't spell? No, it's just because it rhymes with Jordan and my high school friends weren't very creative :)