Caleb is a passionate, dedicated Game Designer with strong technical abilities. As a graduate student, Caleb developed a deep love for the artistry and hard work required to make an engaging game. He earned his technical chops over five years building enterprise web applications.
Since starting his career as a professional Game Designer, Caleb’s love for the game design process has only grown. From collaborative brainstorming, grinding out details in a document, working in the trenches with the engineers to implement, all the way to testing and tuning, Caleb loves to see a game take shape and to give players something to love.
Summary
- Team Lead with a passion for working in the trenches and advocating for his team.
- Developed games professionally in Unity with C# and on proprietary software.
- Passed a critical Proof of Concept milestone on a publisher-backed RPG.
- Hosts a monthly game design live stream for a local game dev community.
- Unreal Engine 4 & 5, Jira, AWS, Microsoft Azure, ASP.Net, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier.
References Available on LinkedIn.
Experience
Digimancy Entertainment, LLC. August 2020 – Present
Digimancy Entertainment is a studio that passionately builds games with rich stories, especially RPGs.
Lead Level Designer (January 2022 to March 2023)
Title: Unannounced Open-World ARPG for PC and Consoles
- Led the Level Design and Quest Design efforts on a ~30-person team developing DLC content for a major publisher IP.
- Designed open-world level maps with considerations for player pathing, multiple solutions, and sight lines.
- Reviewed and provided constructive feedback for team members on their designs both on-paper and in-engine.
- Orchestrated cross-team collaboration on Quest structure from high-level concept to detailed step-by-step flow.
- Learned the intricacies of a custom, internal game engine and assisted in training other team members.
- Implemented logic flows for quest scripting.
- Planned and organized team sprint tasks and goals.
- Prototyped and developed the team’s sprint and Kanban workflow in Jira.
- Daily advocated for the team’s needs; communicating blockers to production and connecting team members to overcome obstacles.
Technical Designer (August 2020 to January 2022)
Title: Unannounced RPG for the PC (August 2020 to December 2021)
- Worked with a team of ~30 individuals on a publisher-backed RPG.
- Managed full feature pipeline ownership of navigational and locomotion game loops.
- Worked on multiple sprint-focused pod teams including Combat, Locomotion, and UI.
- Relied on as a communications point for multi-discipline efforts taking the design perspective to other teams including art, narrative, and quality assurance.
- Created UI to enhance exploration while maintaining player immersion with Unity’s Canvas system.
- Collaboratively designed a stat-driven combat system with multiple party members.
- Built UI to cleanly display combat ability outcomes.
- Tuned the gameplay camera to focus the player’s attention.
- White boxed 4 levels with an emphasis on exploration.
- Worked alongside the art team to convert white boxed level to full visual fidelity.
- Created a movement script with the A* Pathfinding Project by Aron Granberg and custom C# scripts to achieve a fluid point-and-click navigation experience.
- Designed a radar stealth system to govern the visibility of non-player entities.
- Connected Quest dialogue with intended locations.
- Tested player experience flows to identify and report bugs.
- Converted a gamepad-based control scheme to a mouse interface.
- Trained a new hire direct report in utilizing the level design tools.
- Tuned player movement speed and rotation via exposed property values in the Unity Inspector.
- Generated NPC entities and distributed them throughout the levels.
- Created a Level Design Tool for building boundaries around levels using C# and Unity’s Probuilder tool.
- Championed an interior storm setting to differentiate levels.
- Designed a player-seeking mine system in C#.
- Crafted hazards for the player to avoid while exploring.
Technical Lead, OgStar Reading, LLC. August 2020 – Present
OgStar Reading is an educational app developed in Unity, available online and on the iOS app store, that uses phonological awareness, writing, and speaking in combination to teach kids how to read and write.
- Upgraded the core game from Unity 2017 to 2022.
- Identifying bugs and features throughout the app and fixing, adding, and improving them.
- Added a Docker Compose pipeline for local development of the web application utilizing nginx, PostgreSQL, pgadmin, and a Ruby on Rails server.
- Developed a Trello board for tracking future work efforts, converting existing bugs and features from a spreadsheet and setting up a priority and story point system to better understand the complexity of work.
- Prototyping a new server architecture to convert from Ruby on Rails to ASP.NET Core 7.
- Meeting with customers to troubleshoot issues in the application.
Product Developer, Covail February 2019 – August 2020
Covail is a business consultant specializing in cybersecurity and data analytics. (Acquired by GoSecure)
- Collaboratively developed an enterprise web application for scientific research cataloging on a team consisting of six agile pods.
- Created end-user facing UI interfaces for filtering, sorting, and aggregating complex chemical research documents.
- Wrote and maintained testing suites at the unit, integration, and end-to-end levels.
- Authored, estimated, and tracked tasks as a part of a regular two-week sprint cycle, primarily through Jira.
- Collaborated with content experts from other teams to understand the core user experience.
Consultant Developer, g2o (formerly ICC Technology) March 2015 – January 2019
g2o supplies staff and business intelligence consulting for 3rd party companies.
- Collaboratively developed an enterprise web application for scientific research cataloging on a team consisting of six agile pods.
- Created end-user-facing UI interfaces for filtering, sorting, and aggregating complex chemical research documents.
- Wrote and maintained testing suites at the unit, integration, and end-to-end levels.
- Authored, estimated, and tracked tasks as a part of a regular two-week sprint cycle, primarily through Jira.
- Collaborated with content experts from other teams to understand the core user experience.
Skills & Abilities
- Able to create a design, communicate it, and collaboratively guide it through implementation and testing.
- Professional experience building games in modern game engines.
- Competent gameplay engineer familiar with C# and Unity.
- Strong interdisciplinary and cross-cultural communication skills.
- Frequently worked on Agile-style teams using common industry task-management software such as Jira and Trello.
- Skilled Full Stack web development using JavaScript, HMTL, CSS, and cloud architecture.
- Three years of graduate school engaged in video game design and analysis.
Education
Muskingum University, New Concord, Ohio
BA, May 2012, Summa Cum Laude
Caleb spent his undergrad years gaining a broad set of experience telling stories through a wide variety of media. Whether through visual communication, graphic design, audio, video, web design, pottery, music, theatre, and others, each experience grew Caleb’s appreciation for the rich variety of storytelling mechanisms available. A particular area of interest was interactive design which Caleb specifically explored over a semester of study abroad at Dundee University in Scotland in the Digital Interaction Design department. For his senior project, Caleb developed an interactive story using QR codes and YouTube videos.
Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
MA, May 2015, Summa Cum Laude
The Digital Storytelling program at Ball State University is where Caleb truly fell in love with Game Design. His focus on game design and analysis led to several papers and ultimately culminated in the development of a text adventure game for his thesis. Accompanying the game, Caleb composed a proposed classification system for game analysis. He additionally served in a teaching capacity, even reworking the undergraduate intro to web design course to include newly updated HTML and CSS standards.
Other Experience
• Active participant and administrator in the local game development community The Central Ohio Gamedev Group.
• Reoccurring volunteer for the game developer conference GDEX.
• Participated in and helped to organize a local Global Game Jam site several times.
• GDEX Game Jam judge in 2020 and 2022.