Benjamin Kalman

• Website: benkalman.com
• Email: btkalman@gmail.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/btkalman/
• Reel: benkalman.com/reel
• Resume: benkalman.com/game-audio
• Based in Sydney, Australia

Game sound designer with recent studio experience, and 11+ game jams where I’ve done the sound design, implementation, music, and usually code. I’ve also released a solo iOS game.

My pre-audio life is as a software developer with 14 years experience in application, web, and full stack development.

Games

My website lists all my games with links to play and videos. These are the highlights:

• Swarmed In (2023), a top-down alien shooter
  • Credits: Sound design, implementation, and music
  • Built with Unity, FMOD, Reaper, and Logic Pro
  • 19 sound effects with 81 assets including variations, and 1 adaptive music loop
• With the Grain (2023), a chill train themed puzzler
  • Credits: Sound design, implementation, music, and code
  • Built with Unity, FMOD, and Logic Pro
  • 13 sound effects with 32 assets including variations, 1 adaptive music loop, and a lot of code
• Starmony (2022), a musical ball bouncing puzzler
  • Credits: Sound design, implementation, music, and code
  • Built with Unity, FMOD, and Logic Pro
  • 8 sound effects with 39 total assets, 1 adaptive music loop, and a lot of code
• Jumpling (2019), an iOS infinite jumper
  • Credits: Solo developer
  • Built with Unity

Skills

• Unity: 5 years of casual experience with general game construction, C#, FMOD integration, etc
• FMOD: creating and implementing full adaptive audio projects
• Reaper: for all my sound design
• Logic Pro: for all my music
• Creating realistic soundscapes for games
• Recording, processing, and editing Foley
• Combining Foley, synths, and plugins to create sound effects
• Composing, performing, producing, and implementing adaptive music loops in a variety of styles
• Fluency in guitar, keys, and drums
• Many software languages and tools such as C#, C++, JavaScript, Python, git, etc

Employment

My employment history is mostly from my software career, with full details on my website. In summary:

• Neara, Senior Software Engineer (2023), working on Neara’s power line software
• Salesforce, Software Engineering Architect (2018-2022), working on Quip and briefly Slack
• Attic Labs (defunct startup), Software Engineer (2015-2018), working on a novel open source database
• Google, Staff Software Engineer (2009-2015), working on Google Chrome

Education

• TAFE Certificate III in Music (Sound Production) (2022)
  • Units include studio recording, audio theory, mixing, music production software, live sound
• UNSW BSc Computer Science (Honours) (2005-2009)

Other

• One way I practice sound design is recreating audio from other games and I upload some of these to YouTube for fun, for example Deep Rock Galactic and Tunic.
• I’ve been continuously playing music since I was 5, and at one point was quite good at French Horn.