Four Years Shipping Games
Tal Scheffer
Gameplay Programmer
BSc Computing Science (Game Engineering) graduate of Newcastle University. I build the systems underneath games: combat, procedural generation, and the editor tools that let designers stop waiting on a programmer.
Shipped · Collaboration with artist, playable on itch.io · 2025
Below
A night-lit narrative platformer about being lost, and the strangers who talk you through it: no combat, no fail state, nothing to fall back on but the conversation.
Shipped · Steam demo live · 2023–2026
A Tale of Sand and Bone
"You play as Shai, a fallen warrior bound to a vengeful spirit, climbing and fighting your way to claim vengeance against the gods."
University project · 2023
Duck Game
A collaborative 2D platformer starring a duck and its duckling companions: sunlit forest canopies giving way to a glowing underground cave.
Newcastle · Inclusivity Game Jam · Nov 2023
The Interview
The piece explores how identity influences experience. Players walk to a job interview as three different characters; each encounters the same environment, but their journey differs based on who they are.
Solo · Unity
Truffle Keeper
An action-survival loop: gather and build out a walled camp, craft weapons at a bench, then spend a Truffle economy at a wandering merchant NPC, with a tamed companion fighting alongside you.
About
A short summary about me
I've spent 4 years building games that are more ambitious than a solo or small-team project usually attempts: a procedurally generated roguelite with a full combat suite, and a systems-dense life-sim built to make an abstract feeling legible through mechanics rather than text.
My design instinct is intuitive and experience-driven before it's theoretical: it comes from the games I actually play, Project Zomboid, Stardew Valley, Terraria, Ark, but I'm just as comfortable defending a design decision with the theory behind it as I am shipping the code for it.
In 2025 I facilitated Newcastle University's student game jams, helping teams scope an idea down to something they could actually finish, then debugging it with them when it didn't work.
- Education
- Newcastle University
BSc Computing Science (Game Engineering)
2023–2026 - Languages
- C#, Python, Java
- Unity
- Unity 2022.3 / Unity 6, Editor tooling, ScriptableObjects, Addressables, Input System, Cinemachine, URP, Tilemaps
- Architecture
- VContainer / Zenject, R3, UniTask, VitalRouter, LitMotion, Odin Inspector, object pooling, state machines