Name: Benjamin Nitschke
Nicknames: abi, exDreamDuck
Email: Benjamin@exDream.com
Skype: exDreamDuck
ICQ: 29615506
Where I live: Germany - Hannover
What I do: Programming Games (in c# and stuff)
A pic of me:
Projects:
What have I done:
- till 2000: was born, going to school, studying, and some smaller projects, boooring
- 2000: WebWars, a small online RTS game for Innonics. Sadly they went bankrupt and the game never came out :-(
- 2001: Games for Kids for the ROSHO GmbH. Still studying. First contact with .NET at the End of 2001.
- 2002: Started to develop a c# Game Engine (since there wasn't much around everything had to be started from scratch). First we decided to make a full game, but since the publishers didn't want to give us anything, we started Arena Wars (frist Title was "WebWars Arena"). Basically it was a remake of WebWars we did 2 years earlier.
- 2003: As it turns out Arena Wars could have a greater potential as originally planed and we continued developing. Only at the end of 2003 some publishers showed first interessts (we tried hard to even get there).
- 2004: Arena Wars comes out in Summer 2004 after 2 years of development. We still put some months of extra work into it to improve it, but our publisher (Ascaron) did not put much interesst in the game there there was very little marketing and also a bad timing when the game was released. But we got a lot of awards for Arena Wars and because so many players where staying and keept playing Arena Wars even without all the marketing, we still improved the game a lot and added much features :-)
- 2004: Now we are developing our next title, doing technology research, more on that next year or so ^^
- 2005: The year of the tools. Wrote many cool apps like the NormalMapCompressor, CountMostUsedKeys, AbiKeyboard and also the free game Rocket Commander. Our next-gen title Armies of Steel was also developed to a publisher-demo version.
- 2006: Started working with XNA in 2006, became an DirectX/XNA MVP. Written the first XNA book, which came out early 2007 and also created the XNA Racing Game starter kit, which is a great looking game on the Xbox 360 utilizing .NET and the XNA Framework. Also done some articles, tutorials, webcasts and video tutorials for Rocket Commander on Coding4Fun. Wrote the title-story for the gamestar/dev magazine. Worked more on technology and couple of smaller games. Still going on ...
- 2007: Founded realis communities and the meinSport.de (sport community) website together with Karsten Wysk (also Co-Founder of exDream)
- 2008: Worked mostly meinsport.de, but also started the Fireburst racing game project at exDream (A racing game for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC using the Unreal 3 game engine from Epic).
- 2009: For the Fireburst project I worked on realising the AI (with Lua scripts working side by side in the Unreal engine), race logic code, render optimizations and other game logic parts. I also worked a lot on dynamic languages, the DLR, python and Lua. All Co-Founders of exDream (myself included) also founded the MobileBits GmbH and we started working on iPhone titles and the DeltaEngine idea grew.
- 2010: Worked all year on the Delta Engine, a .NET multiplatform game engine that makes creating games really easy and fun. Games written with this engine already run on iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7, Xbox 360, Windows, Linux, Mac and many more platforms to come. Some smaller, mostly mobile game projects were also realized, most notably the games ZombieParty (iPad party game for up to 4 players) was realized and our team worked on SoulCraft, a 3D RPG game also realized with our engine. For the other projects check out MobileBits Games page.
Wanna know more? Ask in the Forums :)