The “Eccentric Kung Fu Master” School of Education

When I first started the bennyscube YouTube channel back in 2011, I had a particular metaphor in mind.

I imagined some kind of eccentric Kung Fu master starting a training hall somewhere deep in the Himalayas. Perhaps a few curious individuals would stumble across my hall. If so, I would gladly share as much of my eccentric teaching with them as they liked. But if not, I would still be there training and perfecting my art on my own regardless. Or that’s how the metaphor went back then, anyways.

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I think one of the key elements of this metaphor is the location: “deep in the Himalayas.” Not many people travel deep in the Himalayas. Among those that do, very few are there because they wish to visit some obscure training hall.

This reflected my expectation when I started my channel: I never expected many people to watch it. I never did anything to promote or advertise it. To me at the time, it really was just something I set up in some obscure corner of the internet for the benefit of the few curious souls who happened to share some of my interests. It was a slightly more modern version of a GeoCities home page.

So you might imagine how surprised I was when there weren’t just a couple people interested in my “eccentric Kung Fu training,” but a couple became dozens, dozens became hundreds, and hundreds became thousands! To stay in the analogy, it was like someone built a massive hotel right next to my “obscure training hall.”

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Of course, I had neither prepared for nor expected that level of interest, and that ultimately led to the channel going in a somewhat different direction than I had originally planned.

This happened again when I started thebennybox: I expected that without the Minecraft craze backing it, that it would likely just be a small, obscure idea in the corner of the internet. Yet that prediction proved even more wrong than the first one. So once again I was unprepared and forced to handle things differently than I had planned.

thebennyblog as a Training Hall

I share this story because when I started this blog, I had once again slipped back into the “eccentric Kung Fu master deep in the Himalayas” mindset. I even mentioned this in the first post: that I expected this project would be “an invisible blog in the abyss of the internet.”

I expected I would post quietly for a bit, sharing and perfecting what I do like the “eccentric Kung Fu master”, but with few people going “deep in the Himalayas” to find my “training hall.” Eventually, some people might discover my “training hall,” and then I could work on how to best share as much as possible with them. But that would be a problem for later. No one would stumble upon my “training hall” right away, so first I would simply focus on building things up on my own for a while.

Perhaps it sounds foolish in light of my history, but I never expected for a moment that if I posted in a new location, in a new format, with no warning or indication, after being silent for years, then on day one dozens of people would notice and rush to welcome me back.

So in one sense, all of this long winded story is really just to express my astonishment and my appreciation for you.

I am continually awed and humbled that you and so many others find such value in the meager things I share.

I only hope that as things get rolling, what I share here will prove to have some value to you as well.

The Other Metaphor

In another sense, however, that’s only half of the metaphor. The whole picture of the “eccentric Kung Fu master deep in the Himalayas” doesn’t just imply obscurity; it also implies a specific education style. For example, an eccentric Kung Fu master is likely to be highly independent, likely to be training and perfecting the art along with the students, and likely to offer more personalized training than you would expect from (for example) a lecture hall.

As I mentioned, in both bennyscube and thebennybox, once the obscurity half of the metaphor collapsed, the education half also changed to accommodate that. The channels ended up going in different directions than I had planned.

Given that, it’s reasonable to expect that if I just went along like normal from here, this blog might also end up somewhere I hadn’t originally expected. In fact, a few people have contacted me or indicated in some other way what sort of hopes and expectations they have for this project already.

So I think at this point, the most important thing is for me to just be open about what’s going on with this blog and where it’s going. To that end, I’m going to close this post with two things to help clarify that:

First, I’m going to lay out some ground rules, so we’re on the same page about what’s going on right now.

Second, I’m going to lay out a “view from 10,000 feet” so-to-say of what some of my immediate and long-term plans for this blog are so we’re on the same page about where things are going right now.

The Rules of Benny’s Training Hall

1. This blog is experimental.

I touched on this in my “Hello” post, but to me, this project is something unorthodox, something different than usual, something not necessarily following or conforming to how things are somewhere else. And moreover, I haven’t fully determined where I want to end up with it yet.

So rather than being an experience like “I’m going into this to do A, B, and C, and I’ll be doing it in ways X, Y, Z,” it’s more like “I’m going to try multiple ideas in multiple ways, and I won’t yet know which will work best for me or for you until after we’ve tried them and learned from them.”

Or in short, the first rule of the Benny agenda is there isn’t currently a Benny agenda.

As an aside, note that this blog being experimental also means these rules are experimental. So I’m likely to end up revising these in some way or another as part of that experimentation.

2. This blog is not a repeat.

Ultimately, I’m doing something new because I intend to produce something new for you. That is, this project isn’t built to be a nostalgia trip rehashing what you’ve already seen from me. After all, if your main interest is in what I’ve already done, then that’s all still there. You’re still welcome to watch my existing videos and get whatever you can out of them.

Instead, I’m going to be aiming for some new things that aren’t exactly the same as what I’ve done before. So it’s good to expect the unexpected around here. This is doubly so when you combine this with rule 1: This blog isn’t just aiming for a somewhat different target, but it’s being experimental within that target, so there may very well be all kinds of zaniness as a result.

That said, I don’t want to overstate this point to make it more than it is. It’s not like I’m about to start blogging on “The Art of Groundskeeping” or some other idea that’s totally out of the left field. At the end of the day, I’m still Benny. So everything is still based on the things I tend to like and take interest in, which in turn means it’s based on the sorts of things you’ve already seen and experienced in various forms on channels like thebennybox and bennyscube.

In that sense, it will still be what you’re familiar with. But nevertheless, it’s something new and not quite what was there before. Does that make sense? It’s related, yes, but new all the same.

3. This blog is honest.

A common thread I’ve noticed in my various hiatuses is they all involve a scenario where I’m not entirely sure how to be fully candid with you while staying within my usual style of communication. For example, as I mentioned in the last post, I ended up accumulating so many things to share that I wasn’t sure how to candidly share them all in my usual video style without shortchanging some things. That uncertainty ultimately led to a period of silence of nearly a year.

I’d much prefer it if it was easy to share things with you just as they are without allowing problematic scenarios like that to accumulate in the first place. To that end, one of my goals for this blog is to create an environment where I can be open and candid with you as much and as easily as possible.

This part is very much a work in progress. For example, my uncertainty in how to candidly respond to the unexpected attention this blog received led to multiple attempts at how to best approach the response. I ultimately settled on the post you’re reading, which sacrifices some of how I’d normally like to respond for the sake of being expedient and candid, but even that still caused a 3 week period between posts.

So there is going to be some question mark as to how to best balance this goal of being candid with as little effort as possible and the goal of posting in a communication style that I think would have the most to offer you as the reader. But that’s where I hope to go with this, at least.

The Road Ahead

The other thing I wanted to loop you in about is where this project is going. In a sense, there is a limit to how exact this can be given the experimental nature of this blog. But there’s a few broad ideas you might want to be aware of.

The most important of those ideas is what I’ve already mentioned: I hope to discuss all the things I did over the past few years. This includes things like:

It’s a simple fact that ancient 8-bit and 16-bit games were ultimately built in less time and with fewer resources than most modern games. But why is that precisely? Is it just the simplicity? Is it something specific to 8-bit or 16-bit constraints? And more importantly, whatever the exact answer is, is it possible to build different types of games with similar reduced time and resources (e.g. a more modern game)? Or is that only possible when building those specific games in those specific styles with that specific technology (and if so, why? What’s special about that specific style or that specific technology that makes that so?)?
- I did a lot of investigation into this question, including designing my own 8 bit console conforming to the authentic hardware limitations of the era in order to really understand what precisely the constraints were and how they impacted the game design process.
- I discovered multiple interesting and illuminating things in this project which I’d like to share with you when the time comes around for it.
I finally built something akin to what I envisioned way back when I started the Audio Programming Tutorial: An audio system that offers the ability to not just play existing sounds and control their pitch, volume and panning, but can synthesize new sounds and sequence music.
- Sounds can be filtered, applied to envelopes, have different waveforms at different pitches, generated from oscillators (including custom oscillators), combined together to create more complex compound sounds, mixed in multiple channels with compression and equalization, sequenced to play at exact times in exact orders, and so on.
- In short, it doesn’t just have the features you’d need to support all your game audio, but a sizable fraction of what you’d need for an in-browser DAW. And all of this is done in a single file of plain JavaScript in under 1k LOC.
- I’m hoping to discuss this project and how it can be used for actual game audio and game music at some point.
At some point I tried making a sort of “ultimate introduction to game programming” tutorial project which intended to take people from the basics to all the essential things they needed.
- The idea was to do this without either hiding anything behind some existing technology or forcing them to go through a ridiculous amount of custom creation to build exactly what was needed.
- It would also be a chance to share many lessons I’ve learned about efficient and effective coding through example.
- The result was essentially a minimalistic 2d game engine in under 1k LOC and various minor game projects designed for it.
- At some point I’d like to share the project. Moreover, I’d still like to share the numerous coding lessons I’ve learned somehow or another, regardless of whether it’s alongside this project or in some other way.
I’ve noticed I’ve reached a point in my game development interests where the code itself, while always important, is rarely the bottleneck. Often it’s the rest of the process that causes the issue, while the code is mostly just something that happens along the way.
- This is interesting for several reasons, not the least of which that this is largely the situation I was in from 2004 through 2011 before I got serious about game technology. So it’s really interesting how things have come full circle again!
- For this, I’m interested in sharing some of the things I’ve learned in game development work which don’t always strictly center on the code. Especially, what exactly is necessary to ultimately tie together with the code to form a worthwhile game as an independent developer.
- I’m also interested in sharing what my experience was like in 2004 through 2011 before bennyscube, since it’s relevant here. I think there’s a lot of lessons I can teach from my experiences attempting game development before I really understood game technology all that well.

And believe it or not, that’s still not everything. I haven’t even mentioned my exploits in AI work which I might bring up at some point or some interesting things I did in several fairly different areas like physics (I’m sure it surprises literally no one that I was greatly interested in the idea of creating a Quantum Physics Tutorial that actually taught it in a way that could be intuitively understood instead of just throwing my hands up at any deeper & difficult questions or obfuscating all the interesting insights behind years of higher math education like the average physics class tends to do).

However, I don’t currently expect I’ll be discussing anything related to those other areas in the immediate future, so I’ll leave those be for now. I daresay I have enough to cover for now as it is!

This post is a little different than what I had planned for my first “actual” post, owing to the unexpected circumstances. So most posts probably won’t be quite like this one. For example, I hope typical posts end up being a little shorter than this! But if all stays according to plan, then in the next few posts you should start getting a more realistic idea of what this blog is supposed to be like first-hand and begin understanding for yourself where everything is going.

‘Til then,
Benny