Phil Brown: The Visionary Behind Reflex Arena And A Leader In Scalable Tech Innovation

Phil Brown is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur with over 20 years in the field, seamlessly blending technical expertise with creative innovation. He founded Turbo Pixel and developed Reflex Arena, building the game engine from the ground up to deliver a fast and smooth user experience.

Phil spent five years as a Staff+ Engineer at Uber, where he designed scalable systems and led key projects such as the Isochrone delivery zones.

Known for his problem-solving approach rooted in simplicity and efficiency, Phil has made a significant impact in both gaming and software development.

We extend our gratitude to Phil for sharing his valuable insights and experiences with us.

IMAGE: PHIL BROWN

What inspired you to start Turbo Pixel and develop Reflex Arena, and what were the biggest challenges you faced while writing the entire engine yourself?

Since a very young age I was always interested in writing software, and in particular games. I remember back to the Apple II computer we had in the family home as a young child, and I remember asking my father to help me code up games on this.

From there my interest only grew, to Quick Basic and eventually into Borland C++. This was a large step up but I loved it. To me programming is like a jigsaw puzzle, I enjoy finding new ways to build things and it brings great satisfaction.

A few years after Borland C++ I discovered Visual Studio C++ and OpenGL. From here I could make full 3d games, this was both a huge step forward in fidelity and excitement. This was around my university years in the early 2000’s when I was making fun projects, which eventually landed me a job in the games industry just as I graduated in 2004.

Many years after being in the games industry I had mastered the art. I had shipped numerous titles, built physics engines, renders, sound engines, everything.

I always grew quickly because I loved this work, I also did it at home for fun which only accelerated things further. Around 2010 we had a slowdown at work and I simultaneously had a fun home project which was picking up speed, this is the point I decided to lean into Reflex and founded Turbo Pixel.

There are pros and cons to writing a game engine by yourself. The obvious cons are you’re crazy, it’s all on your shoulders. The pros are, you have full control over the architecture, you can make it as streamlined & elegant as you like.

Which is exactly what I did, the tech behind Reflex is extremely sound, the game feels beautifully smooth, runs extremely fast and responds just as you expect a twitch shooter should. It set out to be a spiritual successor to the Arena Shooter, and It absolutely nailed it.

Technically we didn’t really run into many hurdles, in fact I’d say quite the opposite; the tech was great, it was engineered well and honestly simply delivered. The game was stable throughout development, even when releasing into early access very early, I’m very happy with how it went.

Honestly the biggest challenge was selling the game (haha)! While the tech was 10/10, the game genre honestly itself fell a bit flat (numerous AAA studios with much higher budgets landed with similar fate). While I absolutely loved building this game, there are absolutely (business) lessons to be learned here.

With over a decade of experience in the games industry, which project or achievement are you most proud of, and why?

Specifically in the games industry my largest public accomplishment is Reflex. This game is still available on Steam and still delivers on what it was made to be. I’m proud of it because it pulls the things I have learned into a single tight product.

Another one less public which is worth mentioning is “Clank” the physics engine I wrote while at Torus Games. This engine scaled from Nintendo DS which is a 67mhz processor, all the way up to a PS3 with 7 SPU processors. The DS doesn’t even support floating nor does it have a divide operator!

This was really satisfying to build as it was all about highly optimized, lean, low level code. It did what it needed to and it did it well.

At Uber, you’ve held a Staff+ Engineer role for five years. Can you share some details about the key projects or initiatives you led during your time there?

Uber was a great experience. I went from engineering low-level optimized code to architecting highly distributed scalable architectures. While intimidating at first I very quickly got up to speed, it’s all computer science and I could very much leverage my experiences. Instead of threads you have multiple processors, instead of low level optimization you optimize for developer velocity and system scalability.

After onboarding at Uber the Covid hit and I was moved to the Uber Eats teams where they handle “Deliverability”.  This was a more “start-up” like environment and allowed me to very quickly got involved. The first project of this team was a migration / cleanup, to get us on a good standing.

From there I worked on a project which increased the delivery zone areas of merchants drastically. This then led into the “Isochrone” project which deal with time based delivery zones. This work allows us to expand delivery zones intelligently e.g. where couriers can actually drive efficiently. This has been a large project which spanned multiple orgs, the end result has been a huge increase in selection for our eaters. This work was later filed as a US patent.

Your career spans both gaming and software engineering. How has your experience in the gaming industry influenced your work in other areas of software development?

One of Uber’s core values is “Great minds don’t think alike”. This resonates to me with my clearly unique background in the games industry. Software engineering has changed a lot in the last 20 years. Today we use services and components, building on the shoulders of giants in the past. This allows engineers to move much faster producing bigger and greater things which is how the world is moving faster and faster.

However; what’s interesting is it means that engineers of today haven’t had to learn how low level systems work and what makes them work efficiently. This gives me a unique angle of experience which is very valuable in the more traditional software engineering world. I can provide direction which can bring orders of magnitude of improvement which others with differing backgrounds may not have considered.

Looking back at your 20 years as a software engineer, what lessons or insights would you say have been most valuable in shaping your approach to problem-solving and innovation?

My number one thing is still the old KISS (keep it simple, stupid) acronym. Today our technology has advanced so much, computers have gotten so fast, and companies have grown so big that there are just tremendous layers of abstraction.

This occurs naturally as every time there’s another project or iteration it literally encompasses the past one and we add a new layer. This allows us to move faster (in the short term) which is great, however it results in systems getting slower and more bloated over time.

This is where I advocate for simple solutions. The simpler it is, the easier it is to understand, the easier it is to maintain & and the faster it will run.

I have seen this time and time again throughout my career. A classic example I like to reference here is a hierarchical spatial data structure which is used for visibility tests, in our case it performed faster by removing all the complexities of the tree and just linearly traversing & testing every single item.

This occurs due to the memory accesses now being perfectly linear and sitting inside the CPU L1 cache, the CPU instructions are trivial and were not the bottleneck. Even more interesting here is the resulting big-O complexity is worse, yet it runs faster when profiled 🙂

What advice would you give to someone aspiring to follow a similar career path, particularly in balancing technical expertise with creative and entrepreneurial projects?

Honestly, tech is an exciting place to be in today’s age. There are tons of things to be built and problems to be solved. I have found that problem solving applies to both technical expertise and entrepreneurial endeavours. Ultimately, we’re trying to build something in an efficient manner that makes someone’s life better.

In terms of advice, I’d say just start building. You have access to unbelievable tools online from scalable web servers to game engines to GPU clusters for AI. You’ll have fun doing it, and its great work to show potential employers!

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