Ballast is an oceanpunk horror FPS, taking place in deep underwater. I like to call it a "Slow Person Shooter". 

I wanted to design and program an FPS from scratch for the longest time, and Ballast is the result of that long unfulfilled desire. It was initially made for Devtober gamejam (2020), spanning over a month, I planned to have 10 days for prototyping, 10 days for art and the last 11 days for putting it all together.

Ballast is made with Godot, the very elegant and compact open-source engine. My goal with the prototype was the program all the first person mechanics from scratch, build the harpoon gun and design the enemy behaviour on a very simple level.

Godot uses a very intuitive interface, coupling the scripting environment with the 3D editor. This enables you do stay in one place and produce prototypes at a blazing pace.

When I moved on to the art, the key idea started off with the below concept I painted based on thalassophobia (which I suffered from for a long time). Basic premise is that the player takes a tense trip underwater to find hidden tressure. 

I find that if I can paint it, I can really see it in my mind's eye. After producing the

I then proceeded to concept the main protagonist in the game, the gargoyle. 

Modeling, rigging and animation was all done in Blender.

Finally, environmental design. The goal here is to keep things low poly and pixel art at the same time. Not only it's an aesthetic I like, it also works well with short timeframes.

I wish to return to this project at some point. Hopefully not too distant in the future. You can download and play it for free, here.