Allow me to introduce Ben, or as he’s known on Nexus Mods, BenGosney. He’ll be the first to tell you it’s not the most imaginative username, but as he says, "I’m easy to find!". We hope you enjoy this interview as much as the last one!
Hey Ben, would you mind introducing yourself?
Hi, I’m Ben! I’m one of the backend developers and a more recent hire. Well, I say recent, but I’ve been here nearly a year – 9 months, I think.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself? What things do you enjoy? Tell us your interests and hobbies.
I am a programmer through and through; it’s pretty much what I do for a hobby as well. I was an avid runner, and I’m trying to get back into it after an injury. I write code, I run, and I walk my dog.
You’ve got to tell me what your dog is called now!
My dog is called Molly. She’s a Romanian rescue dog, so I’ve got no idea what she is; she’s just dog!
Well, actually, it didn’t align with what I’d been doing before, which is what kind of attracted me to it. I’d been doing agency work for the last 15 years, mostly eCommerce websites and brochure sites, and that was getting boring. It’s hard to sell certain cool features to clients when they have to pay for them. Whereas now, I get to work on a bigger, longer-lasting project where everyone wants to make it better. It’s a whole set of different challenges, the main one being scale, yeah I’ve not done anything at this scale of users before, so that’s fun.
Could you run us through a typical day at Nexus Mods for you in your role?
I come in and pick up on anything I’ve missed because we work flexi-time. There are people still working after I go home because I get in quite early to avoid the traffic. I catch up on any chats or incidents that happened overnight so I’m aware of things. I pick up where I left off the day before, then we have a morning stand-up to get the whole team aligned. After that, I carry on with my daily work until lunchtime and then continue until it’s time to go home.
For people who might not know what your job as a Backend Developer entails, could you give us a summary of it and how that relates to your work here at Nexus Mods? Easier said than done, I know!
Um, yeah haha! It can obviously be quite varied, but pretty much what I’m doing now is working on the API to add new endpoints so that the new Nexus website can use them. Backend is everything you can’t see.
How do you find working at Nexus Mods?
Yeah, it’s good. It’s entirely different because I don’t have clients anymore; it’s a different set of pressures. We have users instead, and a lot more of them! It’s not essentially a client, or a client who doesn’t know. Not to disparage clients who don’t know the web – that’s why they come to an agency – but they still say, “I want x.” Whereas here, we have a product team, a design led internally instead of some strange arbitrary external pressure. I used to have odd things that I’d have to put into eCommerce sites and think, “That’s not how you do it,” but the client is paying for it, so you don’t argue and carry on doing it. So that’s quite fun. Obviously, having the pressure of all these millions of users can be quite daunting at times. Deploying code is always fun as you’re never quite sure of the scale. Something that adds a few milliseconds can have a massive knock-on effect when it’s happening on every page load.
Have you always been into gaming and modding yourself?
Yes! Gaming is how I got into programming in the first place. When I was growing up, I got hold of a secondhand Commodore 64 that came with a full manual, which is a full manual on how to program it. So I started playing with that. I started making mods for Quake 2 and Half-Life, and that helped me actually learn to program properly. I found I liked programming more and tried to make my own games, which was REALLY hard and probably needed scaling back a bit. Then I went to college to get a piece of paper to prove I could programme, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
You mentioned you tried to make your own games. What style of games were they?
I got as far as a little 3D terrain engine in OpenGL, which would’ve been back in 2001, back when that was cool and hard to do. Whereas now it’s quite easy to grab Unreal Engine and make a game; you don’t have to do as much of the hard stuff yourself.
Do you think you’d ever give it another crack with new resources like Unreal Engine?
Yeah, I’ve made a few little 2D games using Godot as an engine. I’ve got a lot of little visual demos on GitHub, like a ray tracer I built. It just renders spheres, nothing fancy, but yeah, it’s all kind of proof of concept to say, “I can do it!” and then I move on.
As you mentioned, you’re a gamer. What would you say was your first game, or at least the one that got you into gaming?
I’m trying to remember the name of it. It would’ve been on the Commodore 64. I think it was called Rainbow Island. It was this weird little platformer where you had to go up and you threw rainbows to kill creatures. My little 2D game was loosely based on a game on the Commodore 64 where you’re a diving dude underwater and you’ve got to collect things and then come back. Those were the first early games. The first “real” game I played properly would’ve been Command & Conquer. That’s what I played on my first ever PC and was the first game I bought. I still play the open-source version, the open RA. I’m a massive Command & Conquer fan.
Off the back of that, what would you say is your favourite game, if you can?
My favourite game has got to be the original Half-Life, yeah without a doubt! It’s one of the pinnacles of first-person shooters, it’s great. The storytelling is impressive considering the character doesn’t speak. The level designs, which the devs don’t like because the levels don’t feel contiguous, but I think that means it just feels like the whole place was built over time. It’s a bit janky these days, but it still holds up, and I replay it every couple of years.
I always think that’s the sign of a good game if you go back to it and it still holds up and you still love it when you come back to it!
Yeah, go back and it doesn’t work haha! But no, it still works; it’s actually impressive.
Is there anything you’re playing at the moment?
Not really at the moment. I think the last big game I played through would’ve been Cyberpunk 2077. Yeah, Cyberpunk or Dead Cells, although I don’t think you can ever really finish Dead Cells. I only ever managed one boss run through it.
Which ending did you get in Cyberpunk?
I’m not really sure. I got the happy ending, I guess. I did get the happy ending.
Is that the one with Panam?
Yeah, I may have cheated a little bit and looked up how to get the happy ending.
It’s the only correct ending I think, with Panam! I’m Panam biased though despite playing a female character.
Yeah, although I was half expecting to get shot somewhere halfway through and end up back in Night City. I was pleasantly surprised when it didn’t happen.
Although you’re not playing too much at the moment, are there any newly released games or upcoming games you’re looking forward to playing?
I do want to play Still Wakes the Deep, mainly because it’s set on an oil rig, and that’s always fascinated me since one of the Modern Warfare levels was on an oil rig. Modern Warfare 2, I think it was. It had levels on an oil rig that were always fun to play through.
You mentioned earlier that you created mods before. What were they? Anything we’d find on Nexus?
None I’ve uploaded to Nexus, as it didn’t exist when I was modding; otherwise, I would’ve done. I did make a little Quake 2 mod back in the day with a friend. We turned it into Quasar, or laser tag as it’s probably known outside the South West. So actually, you didn’t die when you got shot. You had to run away and recharge your gun. The level was based on an actual laser tag place in Weston-Super-Mare that we used to go to as kids.
Oh, also before we go, I heard on the grapevine you’ve done some pretty cool stuff in Blender. I’d love to hear more about it!
It’s something I did years and years ago. More rambling backstory, but my friend who I made the mod with originally – his dad was actually a games developer for Harrier Attack on the ZX Spectrum, I believe. Any old people might remember that. So he managed to get us some questionable copies of 3DS Max, the modelling software everyone used. It’s the same thing they used to make The Matrix back then, as well as VS Code. So, thousands of pounds worth of software we probably shouldn’t have had haha. But, you know, we weren’t making any money with it, just playing around with it. In previous jobs, I’d done a bit of CAD work, so then during lockdown, I quite fancied doing some 3D modelling. The programming was getting a bit much, and I couldn’t get out anywhere. So I started following this Australian dude, the Blender Guru, who does the doughnut tutorials. I started following his doughnut tutorial, and yeah, went from there, did a few things. I did a little tutorial on how to make a house, like a stylised house, and also some rooms. The place I previously worked, one of our websites which we kind of had part ownership of, was a bathrooms website, and we talked about doing virtual bathroom stuff. So I started playing with doing the room layouts and modelling the baths. You could actually get the plans, and it was very easy to model as you just typed in the numbers to actually do them, so we did some proof of concept for that.
Finally, is there anything you’d like to say to the community?
I might get on my soapbox as I do work with a dog rescue, which is actually where we got our dog from. So I’d like to say, if can you, please consider adopting a dog before going to a breeder.
Once again, a big thank you to Ben for the interview. We’ve got more lined up, so you can get to know the team even better.
See you in the next one!
16 comments
Nice t'meet ya, choomba! \o/
Good interview! Hella nice read!
Wow, that doughnut pic is from Blender?! Looks like a photograph!
if feedback is appreciated, I'd rather like to see in-depth interviews with modders contributing the most last years, like JayS, Ersh, doodlez, m8r98a4f2, psiberx, Fluffy, Seb, Volitio etc. I believe people reading those are not users, but modders mostly and for modders it would be interesting to learn from/about the best fellow modders rather than reading Nexus stuff CVs. Apologies, if that sounds rude.
There have been 3 in the last month and the community is not short on additional talent.
Feedback is always appreciated though, and me and the Content Team are always reaching out to mod authors to be interviewed, so we'll be sure to take the modders you've suggested into account. We try and mix it up each month so there's a variety of games being covered :)
Also, if you'd like to read it, we did an interview with JaySerpa last year, which you can find here.
We also want the community to get to know us here at Nexus more, so I'm sprinkling in the 'Get to Know' and 'New Starter' interviews in between.
what I meant is we modders interested mostly in, duh, modding (I know, boring). so first of all it would be nice to hear mods stories from the best of us.
For example, i do have a doggo too and i do appreciate all dog owners (mostly bc in my country (Russia) it's more cat fans i do not like at all
Rated 12 out of 10 for pupper awesomeness 🐶
Oh, and seconded on your comment about adopting a dog. There are many who need a home and the rescue charities can be incredibly supportive if you need advice.
Also, my dog Lady is a 12lb Poodle that I received through an animal rescue outfit and she's been with me for 16 years.