Hi, I'm Ben.
I’m a creative and ambitious soul that loves crafting games. I've had the privilege of creating and shipping an epic mix of games over the past decade.
Hi, I'm Ben.
I’m a creative and ambitious soul that loves crafting games. I've had the privilege of creating and shipping an epic mix of games over the past decade.
AKL
New Zealand
Time
17 Years Designer
11 Years Game Designer
6 Years Game Director
Games
2x AA Games Shipped
2x Indie Mobile Games shipped
5x Work for hire games shipped
3x Games on ice 😭
Recognition
VR GOTY Finalist
Raindance Immersive GOTY
PSVR 2 GOTY Finalist
4x Gold Best Awards
NZ PAV Award Best Art
IMGA GOTY Finalists
2x FWA of the Day
Partnerships
PlayStation
Meta
Pico
Core Expertise
Game Design
Game design is a core strength of mine - crafting mechanics, balancing systems, and partnering with engineers to build great loops, while refining UX, onboarding, and pacing to land the right emotions and keep players returning.
+ Mechanics & systems
+ World Buildiing
+ UX/onboarding
+ Narrative & Writing
Game + Creative Direction
Great games start with a clear promise to the player. A Creative Director holds that promise - shaping the vision, setting the quality bar, and aligning design, art, audio, and tech so the experience feels coherent end to end.
+ Art Direction
+ Strategy & Pitch Decks
+ Concepts & Briefs
+ Quality Control
+ Styles Guides & GDDs
Level Art
I’m deeply passionate about crafting worlds - bringing all the ingredients of a level together and shaping them into epic, cohesive experiences. Highly experienced in Unreal Engine and comfortable owning a level from grey-box to polished worlds that also hit performance targets.
+ Grey-boxing
+ Worldbuilding
+ Set Dressing
+ Foliage and Landscapes
+ Optimization Processes
UI / 2D Art
My previous experience as a graphic & digital designer has given me great skillset in 2D Art and UI design having shipped fantastic UI/graphics on many titles.
+ Game UI Concepting
+ Game UI Development
+ 2D graphic design / art
+ Game branding
Bonus Expertise
Narrative Design / Storytelling
Across the Wanderer games, I used Articy as our non-linear narrative backbone - designing and implementing branching flows for 12+ hours of story, writing thousands of dialogue lines, building hint systems, and collaborating with external writers to unify the vision.
+ Narrative scripting
+ Crafting stories
+ Flow design
+ Dialogue writing
Trailer Creation
Trailer creation seems to be my secret talent. I’ve worked on over a dozen trailers ranging in tone, helping draw in eyeballs, set expectation and most importantly build hype. I’ve successfully had viral trailers, and trailers that pulled in over 1 million views.
+ Game capture
+ In-engine cinematics
+ Storyboarding
+ Editing
+ Motion graphics
+ Strategy
