Ben Naulls

Game Designer - Teacher - Compulsive Prototyper

Me

​Hello folks!

I'm a game developer and design teacher residing in Melbourne Australia.
I have worked on several small games and done some freelancing some my own work. I mainly focus on user experience, education through play, and procedural world generation.

Have a look around and feel free to get in contact with me!

Designer & Producer

Design is my passion, and it is also what I teach.

It's all about pen & paper, rapid grey boxing, rapid iteration, failing faster and prototyping the player experience.

Programmer

I spent most of my previous life in business programming, databases, and web development. But these days my strengths are with C# and C++.

I do most of my game development in the Unity game engine, but I love tinkering around with whatever is available.

Teacher

I have 3 years+ experience teaching game design, production management, programming, and mentoring at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE) in Melbourne Australia.

But instead of me telling you about me , here are some quotes from some of my students.
​

As a teacher, he really pushes you to one up yourself, and if you get praise you deserved it
@leafy_breeze​

If Ben taught me one thing, it's to burn my babies. Best advice I ever got.
@MarioDoesDesign

Ben teaches his students good habits and how to solve problems without needing to rely on him or other people so that we learn how to teach ourselves or where to get the information to teach from.
His very passionate about things that interest him and always tries to make those things better, not by just putting a band aid on it but  from the ground up.
He really wants his students to better themselves by giving them the foundations to create amazing things.
@DTotoski

Ben gives great feedback and has a knack for figuring out how to improve a game.
​@AskTrentSwanson

Totally unfair, i didn't do any of the work and he failed me!
​@theNickBarnett

Gives the best life advice - "Stare at more squirrel butts"
@danstuddert

Ben was one of the best teachers I've had, went above and beyond to help students and is generally a great human being, 10/10
James Jesic

Hard But Fair, Critical But Caring.

Ben pulls no punches, and he can be counted on to tell you how it is. If you're doing something that's wrong or will not fly in the industry he will tell you and for god's sake please listen to him. There will be times that you will hate him. He will also push you harder and further than any other teacher will, and he does that because he cares about seeing you make mistakes and learn from them so you can improve as a designer.

You probably will never get another teacher as committed to helping you improve, so talk to him and ask him as many questions as you can while you have the chance because you will miss him once he's gone.
@Lachlanrm

Current Projects

Over the past year I have been working on a game with the working title of 'Five days till Midnight'.
The game is a late 90's themed nostalgic narrative driven game played entirely through an operating system similar to windows 98.

My main focus over the last year has been building the OS, but now that part is nearly done I have been focusing my effort into building the main story mechanics and the player experience.

​If you are interesting in following the game, I post my progress of it on twitter.

Prototyper

I spend a lot of my free time working on ideas simply to see if I can do them, most fall into a pile for future reference. Some turn into lessons for my students and others are great learning tools to see how games are made or to get an idea out of my head.

​Here is a random selection of things I have worked on over the past 12 months.