Richard Benson is a Lead Gameplay Engineer at Ripple Effect Studios. He possess expertise in game development, gameplay, video games, multiplayer, game engines and 42 more skills. Colleagues describe him as "Richard interned at Xtreme Games LLC in 1996-7. We were developing a game called Rex Blade, a 1st person shooter based on an advanced ray caster system with a very flexible control and scripting system among other things. Richard was tasked with developing the entire level editing tool chain for the game. What made this complex was not only the complexity of the game engine itself with so many potential behaviors for all the game objects, but that the tool had to run on a 486 class machine of the time, graphically render the 2D view, scale, zoom, pan, etc. at high speed and have a sane GUI for the level designers to work effectively. Richard had to learn Delphi, the engine data structures (which were a work in progress and always in flux), and many other technologies on the fly including 3D. Considering we had only a 45 day schedule from concept to alpha. Richard and I sat in the same room as I coded the game and 3D engine. I would pass Richard the new data structures, and he would implement them into the tool. Together we worked iteratively until the game engine and first alpha demo worked. The 3D engine couldn't be tested really until the tool worked, and tool not until the engine worked, so we both had to finish to try the system due to its complexity. At 4:30am roughly on a weekday as the sun seemed to start coming up, for the first time I did a walk thru of a simple level and everything worked perfectly! I found that Richard is a very methodical programmer, he listens well, and gets the job done. I doubt that anyone else could have kept up with me during this time and my 130+ hour a week schedule. Without Richard, we wouldn't have been able to hit the ridiculous deadline set by Simon & Schuster! I recommend Richard for any 2D, 3D game development, programming, or related task regardless if he has experience in the specific technology or not. He learns fast and doesn't have a preference for any specific technology or ideology, thus he just likes solving problems rather than arguing about which OS or API is better. Since the days of Rex Blade, Richard has worked for me on and off on little projects. He has co-authored one of my books as well as written small games and tools for some of the game consoles I have developed. Additionally, Richard has tackled some hardware hacking with no formal background in EE." and "I worked with Richard ("The Elf" aka "Keebler") Benson at Dreamworks Interactive and then later at EALA. Richard is a very talented engineer who always sought to accomplish the task at hand in a timely way but balanced that with a strong desire to hit the highest quality possible in his work."