Caleb Gaffier
unity Indie game DESIGN & developer
Hello! My name is Caleb Gaffier and I’m a Indie Game Dev a degree with a computer science and experience in teaching, team building, project management, problem solving, and design & development.
About me
Born and raised in Michigan, I have always been deeply engaged with the gaming community. As a largely self-taught indie developer, I have gained experience across a wide range of workflows, tools, and technical challenges.
I am passionate about bringing worlds and ideas to life and the systems that support gameplay and design, focusing on solving technical problems and connecting front-end experiences with the robust back-end. To me, programming and game development combine problem-solving, debugging, and creativity, offering constant opportunities to generate ideas and inspire others.
During my education, I attended Middle College and TEC, where I dedicated a significant portion of my high school experience to learning programming and development. Later, during college, I assisted in teaching computer science fundamentals at a previous institution for one semester.
qualifications
2025 GAME JAM
Death is served
Untitled: “seafarers”
writing sample: rain rain
Community involvement
EXperiences & certifications
Paraprofessional Teaching in:
Java, Python, Computer Science Fundamentals
ACT WorkKeys NCRC Gold
Associates Degree in Computer Programming
3+ Years experience in C# and Unity game dev & design
2+ Years experience in Java
Team building and project management
5+ Years of Writing Telling
MTA Python Certified 2021
MTA Java Certified 2022
MTA Java Script Certified 2022
MTA HTML & CSS Certified 2022
MOS Word Associate Certified 2022
5-Day Game Jam (October 2025)
Theme: “Death is an Opportunity”
Interpretation: “Death is an Opportunity — A Job Opportunity!”
With two artist, I participated in a five-day jam as the sole developer where we designed and delivered a playable game under a strict deadline with no prior planning.
My role and responsibilities:
100% of development and asset implementation.
Project planning and scope definition.
Time management and decision making under pressure.
Iterative feedback & communication for both gameplay and assert needs.
Setting realistic technical limits to ensure a playable build.
Due to time constraints, several features had to be cut, including additional environmental polish and vital tutorial gameplay sequence. Despite this, we successfully delivered a complete and functional project within five days. The projected was rated by 52 Users and landed within the top 13th percentile of submissions for overall and within the top 5% for creativity and visuals.
This project reinforced the importance of scope control, rapid iteration, and close collaboration. Working with teammates preserved motivation and momentum to delivered a semi-polished project. Because of this experience, I was able to appreciate the beauty of working with a team.
“Death is serverd”
“Death is Served” is a small Indie game created in five days.
The team included two artist and myself as the sole developer.
Set in the Land of The Dead, a witch (the player) finds themselves needing an escape. Equipped with skills from a past life, she takes a job in the afterlife, turning death into a new opportunity: a job opportunity!
The core gameplay loop centers around time-based order management and interactive minigames. The shift begins with a short grace period, allowing our witch to prepare raw ingredients ahead of time. Orders are communicated through the notepad and emoji bubbles. Recipe’s are made to be intuitive where they take the steps to make them is in reverse order to it’s name.
For example, “Bloodied Baked Flesh” requires you to get flesh, bake it, then bloody it beneath the sink.
From a technical standpoint, the project is built upon reusable systems for code and time efficiency. Multiple minigames share common interactive logic such as object dragging, collision handling, and completion flags. Meanwhile more complex minigames, such as the oven, require careful layer and state management to maintain visual clarity and functionality.
Unreleased: “seafarers”
Untitled “Seafarers” is a sailing, fishing, cargo delivery game focused on exploration and economical progression.
You start from humble begins, fishing local waters before earning gold to travel further across the sea, trading goods between regions with differing supply and demand.
Each region values and produces different resources, encouraging players to plan trade routes. For example, the most northern region will value spices, medicine, luxury goods, and crops while exporting timbers, metals, and fish.
The project features a diverse range of interconnected and independent systems, all built with salability and reusability in mind:
Core Systems Implemented:
Inventory and equipment management
Daylight and weather system
Material Importer
Water buoyancy in reaction to shader waves
Procedural ship wheel handling
Fishing system with location-based loot tables.
One of the many systems used within the project was a dat-driven material manager. Items are generated though a JSON file reader that constructions items with tags, values and information, icons, and models at runtime. This allows new items to be added by simply modifying the JSON and adding assets to the appropriate folders, reducing unity-side setup.
WRITING PROJECT: RAIN RAIN
“It was said that before the downfall came the drought. The lands were dry and brittle. When the rain came, it was all but a mere sprinkle. But once it started, it never went away. It wasn’t long until the roads started to go to ruin. The carts all got stuck, the axles wore away and the wood began to rot. The animals got sick, then the people. The homes began to flood and the fields went to ruin.”
“Why did it never go away?”
Rain Rain is a brief writing project set in a “Post-Apocalyptic” fantasy setting where the line between planes blur together. Rain began one day and by the time it came to a halt, the world was flooded and towers of civilization appeared. Within the towers, their world was captured, outside of them, the plane of water and it’s deep sea creatures and anomalies lurked.
The setting was developed to pair with a resource based table top system developed to fit a souls-like system. Players build their characters from the ground up and must act together to overcome challenges.
community involvement
During my schooling, I collaborated with a team of students to develop a website for the St. Clair County Down Syndrome Support Group, a local organization focused on education, awareness, and community support.
The website included multiple sections and pages including donation functionality, contact and email systems, and resource pages highlighting Down syndrome and related support groups. Although the website is no longer active, the project required close collaboration with both teammates and the organization to align design, functionality, and accessibility with their goals.
This experience strengthened my ability to work with contractors and allowed me to contribute to a project with community impact.
