Ben Vinson

University of Colorado Boulder

Software Engineering For Game Developers

While studying at CU, John Flynt reached out to me about putting a team together to create a game that would be the basis for his book Software Engineering for Game Developers. I lead a team of students consisting of engineers and artists in creating Ankh, a 3D turn based strategy game similar to Final Fantasy Tactics or XCOM. The game featured a custom engine built on top of Direct3D as well as a level editor to create your own campaigns. In all honesty this was a very difficult project to finish while simultaneously taking classes and working various part-time jobs, but I am extremely proud of how it came together. Below are some quotes from an Amazon review talking about the game we built. It is an amazing feeling to know you have helped someone out on their quest to learn how to make games:

The glory of this package - the beautiful, incredible magic of the package - comes from the attached CD. The book is supposed to guide you through the development of a full video game, and to that end they have written an impressively large game called Ankh.

You will see the actual development of a complete 3D game from start to finish. It is fully OO, programmed in 100% C++, and you are going to be amazed as you watch it come together. Take the source apart, look at what they add from stripe to stripe, and see how it all comes together.

Seriously, this CD was EXACTLY what I needed to take my C++ books and my DirectX books and learn how to bring them together into a knowledge of software engineering. The book itself is so dull that in 7 years of owning it I have never read more than 100 pages of it. But the CD... oh, this CD was key in my formative days. If you are looking to really learn how object oriented game programming comes about, do whatever you can to get ahold of this CD. It is going to provide you with months of educational gold.

Simulation and Event Modeling for Game Developers

I wrote this book with John Flynt during my senior year at CU. It covered various topics about simulation and how it could be applied to game development. Each chapter included an example application built using a custom game engine built on top of DirectX using C++. If I'm being honest with myself, this follow-up effort at creating a book taught me that I'm a much better engineer than author. That being said I'm still proud that we were able to complete the book on time and I learned a lot in the process.

Game Coding Crash Course

This presentation at DCC 2017 was intended to introduce game development to people with little to no programming experience. I took one of the most basic Unity tutorials and expanded upon it in several discrete steps to create a simple game using C# in about 20 minutes. At the end of the talk we asked who now felt confident enough to start developing games on their own and the majority of the participants raised their hands, which was amazing!

Leeroy Jenkins & The PALS FOR LIFE

The Art Institute of Colorado invited Leeroy Jenkins and his PALS FOR LIFE to host a panel to talk about the origin of our famous video and discuss how online gaming has changed since then. It was great to get the gang back together and talk shop with our fellow gamers. One talented student who attended was nice enough to sketch a picture of the panel members:

Avoiding the Danger Zone: Scaling & Load Testing

This was a talk I gave along with fellow Kongregate co-workers Ryan Golec and Max Murphy. The focus was scaling and load testing, with the target audience being smaller independent game studios. We covered the creation of Kongregate's new chat system KWAK (chat with a K) and discussed the many hurdles we ran into (and thankfully solved) while attempting to hit our target goal of 350K concurrent users. The talk was very well received, and it was great to field questions and discuss similar problems other developers have run into and how they solved them.