I’m Ben Zeigler and I have 20 years of experience working as a programmer in the game development industry. I spent most of my time working as a game and engine developer at Epic Games, and contributed a lot of code to Unreal Engine 4 and 5. I started my career working at Cryptic Studios developing MMOs, and have also worked on a number of AAA and indie games as an employee and consultant.
I have worked on a bunch of different projects over the years, here is my rough development history:
- 1996-2001: As a teenager I learned how to program C (my dad worked at IBM), and experimented with making random DOS games. I (using the name JZig) mostly hung out in the MegaZeux community, which was a DOS game creation system similar to ZZT. I worked on the initial open source release of the game and other random Linux and DOS projects.
- 2001-2005: I went to college at RPI, where I got a Computer Science degree and helped found the Game Development Club. For some reason the games program was part of the Psychology department, which started my interest in the subject and lead to me getting a second Psychology degree.
- 2005-2010: At Cryptic Studios, I worked on City of Heroes, Champions Online, and the Neverwinter MMO. I mostly focused on system fundamentals and server functionality, including a custom object database which is still in use.
- 2010-2017: At Epic, I was the lead gameplay programmer during the early development of Fortnite. I was responsible for porting the original prototype from UE3 to UE4 and helped build many of the core gameplay systems that are still in use today. I left this (extremely stressful) position right before Fortnite Battle Royale was released.
- 2017-2019: After that, I moved to Unreal Engine team to work on the fundamental systems used by all games. I wrote data loading systems like the Asset Manager, helped build the Gameplay Ability System, and added many features to the Blueprints system. At Epic, I wanted to do everything I could to make it easier for creative devs to make and publish games.
- 2019-2023: I left Epic and spent a few years working as an independent consultant on various games using the engine. I did this part time while working on my Masters in Psychology.
- 2023-2026: I went back to working for Epic (as a contractor in the beginning) and helped build the Lyra game sample for UE5 and worked to improve the UE4 systems and help build new features like Gameplay Feature Plugins. I wanted to use my experience working with licensees to improve the engine experience for everyone.
- 2026-future: I left Epic again (for a variety of reasons) and am taking a break from the game industry. I’ll probably be back at some point.
Mobygames has a decent credits list, but here are all the games I made significant contributions to:
I also worked on a bunch of smaller projects as a contractor, many of which were never actually released.