Ben Shackman

Game Programmer and Unity Developer

Studio Projects


Programmer for Immortal Glade

Becker Greenlit Studio | 2020 - Ongoing

Immortal Glade is an upcoming micro focused tower defence game in which the player controls the spirit of the forest in its quest to defend the forest from a kingdom which seeks its destruction. The player must use all of the abilities, towers, and direct control commands in order to protect themselves from the oncoming threat.
Immortal Glade is not yet available for download.

Contributions
  • Manager for GIT based source control on this project.
  • Developer for a procedural grid system which dynamically adapts to terrain.
  • Mechanics programmer for A-Star based navmesh integrated into the aforementioned grid system.
  • More items will be populated as development continues.

Programmer and Producer for Cell Team 6

Becker Game Studio | 2019 - 2020

Cell Team 6 is a Level Based, Twin-Stick Bullet-Hell game in which the player assumes the role of an immune cell, and fights off infections plaguing their host's body. Cell Team 6 is unfortunately not available for download right now but a trailer can be seen above.

Cell Team 6 uses licensed Unity Libraries and so cannot be made open source, but several of my contributions are available here.

Contributions
  • Manager for GIT based source control on this project.
  • Mechanics programmer for player weapons and projectile mechanics.
  • Developed Finite-State machine based AI system to support enemy variation in behavior and movement.
  • General developer for many backend systems including a dynamic ability system that allows for real-time ability switching.
  • Assisted in team coordination, task management, and distribution of tasks during the latter half of development.

Programmer for Waking Nightmare

Becker Game Studio | 2018 - 2019

Waking Nightmare is a 2D horror, puzzle platformer in which the player controls two children, Olivia and Thomas. Confronting their various fears, the two characters, both controlled by the player, work together to escape their nightmare.
Waking Nightmare is available on Itch.io.
The source code and project are also available on Github.

Contributions
  • Managed GIT for the latter parts of the project.
  • UI programmer for the majority of the unique elements present in the game.
  • Implemented multi-faceted fear mechanic.
  • Developed tools allowing for easier access to source control without Git or Command line knowledge.
  • General Mechanics programmer for many core features within the game.

Independent Projects


Time Travel CRPG Prototype

A prototype of a time travel CRPG created in just under a week, this project contains a prototype for an RPG based around a save system that allows some information to be carried through loading, while world state is bound to save-states, acting as a player-controllable time travel mechanic.
This project also implements a slightly modified version of YarnSpinner, a Unity dialogue package.

This Prototype is available in my Personal Projects Repository.

Premeditated Stealth Game Prototype

A tech-demo for a stealth game in which the player pre-plans all of their actions before moving, and can iterate on their actions until successful. This project was created primarily for an Game AI class, and to experiment with dynamic Unity UI Features.

This project was created in collaboration with Jacob Ledoux and is available on our shared Github Repository for this project.