I'm Ben Whittaker
I am embarking on a hopefully long and fruitful career making games. This site will be a place to put said games, news about said games, and any other miscellaneous projects I happen to be working on.
Games I've Made
Posts I've Written
Junglautomata!
So I’ve decided I might as well officially release Junglautomata, the shader-powered sandbox thing I’ve been fiddling with. Not only does it now have a page on this site, I’ve also submitted it to the Google Play Store. So yeah, check that out, maybe leave a rating on the play store?
More experimentation with cross-posting
So, given that I evidently can’t easily ensure that the content of a post will be survive the transition to facebook without losing formatting and embedded images and videos and stuff, I think I’ll just have it post a link to each blog post and let people click for the content.
Cross-posting to Facebook
Seeing as I’m a bit more active on my website than facebook, and people on facebook might be in interested in the stuff on my website, I’m experimenting with using IFTTT to repost my blog to my feed.
This is basically a test post. I suspect things like embedded videos won’t work right, but hey, let’s find out:
Ludum Dare 35: Mimicry
I participated in Ludum Dare 35, along with my entire apartment, and it went okay! The theme was Transform, so we made Mimicry: a game about imitating objects and eating people. Read more and play the game here, and check out the Ludum Dare page here.
Catching Up: Professor Cog and the Clocktower of Doom
I’ve added Professor Cog and the Clocktower of Doom to the site, a 48h game jam game from 2014. Check it out!
Blitz Plane Blast Installer and Source Code
- Rob Edmonds has added AI Players to Blitz Plane Blast! They make for challenging opponents. It’s pretty cool.
- With the addition of AI, I’ve decided that I should probably actually put the game up for download. So now the game’s up for download!
- And finally, I’ve decided to make the source code public, so that I can show off my engine. Because did you know I made the engine we used all by myself, from scratch? I totally did. I’m rather proud of it.
Demo Reel and Another Year
I’ve finished all my coursework, I’ve got no exams, and I’m graduating. Seems like a good time to update my website!
One of my courses this past semester was Demo Reel Development. As you might guess, in this class I had to create a demo reel. I think it turned out pretty well! It also contains a bunch of projects I haven’t put on this site yet.
Check out the video below the break!
The Year we Won
I have now conquered my third year at university, and great things have marked it’s passing. In particular, we made a game. We made an awesome game, and to our great satisfaction, it’s awesomeness has been acknowledged.
The game is the sideview dogfighting game Blitz Plane Blast. Our idea was to make a party game, specifically designed to be fun to show off to lots of people, inspired by things like Smash Bros. and Starwhal. I dare say we succeeded!
Filmmaking and Animation Assignments
I recently had to make a couple of videos for school.
New website!
I’ve been working on this new iteration of the website for a while (in between other projects), and it’s finally live!
The most important new feature for visitors is the new responsive layout, making it look lovely on small screens and mobile devices. Resize the browser and see!
Under the hood, everything’s been rebuilt from scratch, using DocPad to generate the site and Amazon S3 to host it. This makes hosting considerably more efficient and cheaper, compared to the old system of WolfCMS + BlueHost. No more PHP here!
Anyways, maybe now that I’ve finally completed the transition I’ll post more often. One can hope, at least.