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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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’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 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.

So I’m starting to take a look at Flash Player 10′s 3D capabilities. I was initially a little disappointed with what was offered, but at a closer glance, this plane-based 3D engine allows me to create my very own polygon-based rooms.

What I have above is a working example of one such 3D room. This sample is a tech-demo for the evolution of Rotat the Rat’s level tools, a game that has nothing else in common with Rotat the Rat.

Using PHP, MySQL, XML and AS3, your daily healthy dose of programming acronyms, I’ve writen an AS3-based API for WordPress. If I continue to grow it, Actionscripters will be able to use this API to build their own wordpress blog without the need for data querying skills. I’m still figuring out what the title will be, but this open source project is sure to be a great way to give back to the WordPress and Actionscript communities.

The platform is incredibly easy to use for AS3 programmers. I am considering making it available as a component for MXML users.

I have an early working example based on my own website, available here.

It seems I’m always saying about how I haven’t posted in a while – but I have a good excuse this time. I just finished up the two games for the Ice Break Win a Ute campaign.

Ice Break are giving a way a Holden SS – V ute to the person lucky enough to find it under the cap. They’re also giving a bunch of petrol-powered, remote-controlled Holden utes to the mosty skilled drivers in an online game called Drift’n'Drag.

Drift’n'Drag is a Cru Digital (the company I am gainfully employed at) concept and, you guessed it, I programmed them both.

The website’s development was handled by my collegue Matt, the art and concept by Cru Digital, the portfolio by De Pasqualle.

I would strongly recommend you check it out, it’s my most proud programming work yet. Who knows, if you get good enough at the game you could even win the remote controlled ute!

http://www.icebreak.com.au – click to visit.

I’ve been working on this one for a while, though recently I’ve revamped it and improved it by a million fold. I present, to you, the drawing tools for Rotat’s level editor.

NB: This content was lost in the great blog migration of 2009. I am working on an advanced version of it and will be sure to share when it is available

The pen draws shapes, the hand moves shapes and the X deletes shapes. Once you start drawing a shape, you can close it by clicking on the first point again. Also, the canvas (in white) is movable.

This is one of my personal favourite examples of my drawing API usage. This one uses some great trig to automatically curve as you draw.

The Rotat level editor will rely on this for user experience, and I believe it is intuitive. Please offer any recommendations to make it more intuitive.

UPDATE: I have now used this Isometric Engine in a live project. Check it out at getoutthere.qld.gov.au.

I decided to try my hand at isometric 3D. I’m developing a basic API called IsoMetrix. It handles all the movement and trig whilst allowing simple adjustments to all axis’.

The company I work for, Cru Digital, has a use for this – and most of the engines me and my colleague Matt looked at were unnecessarily complex. Hopefully, with a some further tweaking, this can do the job we want.

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I’ve recently made this demo, at work, for an advertising firm named Hook. It is entirely scripted – even the hook’s drawing – and no library elements were used to create it.