The Breaka Jetski Game Engine Explained
(written for Cru Digital)

Games are a powerful medium. While a film can only provide a few hours of entertainment to a group of people, a game can provide potentially limitless entertainment to a potentially limitless audience through the lure and viral spread of social competition. When Breaka commissioned us to create a microsite, we put a game front and centre. A good game needs a great idea, a tonne of play-testing, ten tonnes of optimisation and a solid framework. In this article I’m going to introduce you some of the processes involved in creating the Breaka Island Jetski Challenge.

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I have been playing with Away3D Lite. Away3D Lite is a stripped back, high performance variant of Away3D with optimisation for Flash Player 10. I might say that, to this point, I am relatively happy with it.

The team at Papervision3D seems to be in hiding these days and I can’t help but think the departure of Ralph Hauwert from the project might have killed it. It is a shame, I have enjoyed working within their system on more than one occasion. On the other site of the fence its younger brother Away has been advancing at blistering speed.

The demo included is my “Hello World” of Away3D Lite. A loaded 3D terrain and some custom camera movement.

So I’ve been playing arround with orchestral composition for a while now and it never really gets a post. Most of what I’ve done is draft or concept and I rarely finish anything, but here are a few:

Adventure of the Something
Zombies Aproach
Scary Spider

Looking for a completely Open Source, lightweight, easy to use tweening engine? So was I.

I announce the first public release of TweenDark, an open source, lightweight, fast AS3 tweening engine.

Click here to read more.

So I’m sporting Ubuntu Studio 9.10 at the moment. This is some excellent software. I’m surprised how user-friendly Ubuntu Linux has become – I’ve been flying through the UI, completing most tasks without the need to operate the console at all.

So, I’ve been doing some more work on Rotat towards rotation. In this tech demo, the wall collision has been removed in favour of the ability to climb walls.

I am certain that this has opened up some interesting gameplay possibilities – especially as the two behaviours can complement each other.

EDIT: The demo has been updated with more accuracy and wall clipping included. We’re still buggy, but coming…

This is a song that will likely be used for an upcoming campaign. Inspired by the work of Michael Land on Monkey Island.

The Secret of Milky Island

This is an early demo of the newly rewritten Rotat Engine.

Left / Right walk, space jumps.

Some of the cool features it has:

• Tight, pixel-based collision detection.
• Real-time gravity.
• Camera control.

The core has also been made in a very robust MVC-like pattern.

This game will be a Handsome Lads game; as this is a technology blog, any further announcements about it will probably be made there.

After a long wait, I’ve got my hosting back in order. I’ll be posting more frequently going forwards starting with the open source release of TweenDark, my lightweight AS3 animation/tweening engine and some cool game stuff for Rotat – which  has, I believe, been completely restarted twice since my website’s hosting issues.

For those who wish to know, I am now on Dreamhost. As far as hosting decisions go, this is easily the best I’ve made – so far they come highly recommended.

Unfortunately, a good amount of the linked filed have disappeared in the migration. I might bring some of it back down the track.

Also news is that I’m co-chairing an indie games studio called Handsome Lads.

I’d also like to thank mono-lab for the WordPress Theme – I will work towards building my own in the near future.

Hey guys,

Just a quick note to let you know I’m going to be down for a few days as I switch hosts. This is largely due to a domain transfer that, for some reason, the current registrar couldn’t do immediately.

When I come back I’ll be on a new host and will be looking to make a few changes to the way I run my site. Expect something along the lines of seperate blogs for software, audio and an overarching personal blog for both (the latter to be similar to the way I run it now). This is, for the most part, due to the widening gap between my audio and software practices. Neither blog will be protected, or inaccessable from the other, I’m just trying to keep web types and musician types in the right spot.