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.

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

A website I recently worked on was awarded an Outstanding Achievement award at the IMAs. This is an achievement on an international playing field, and one that I am proud to have been a part of.

The website was designed by Garth Sykes and developed by myself at Cru Digital for Michael Cook and Photographer’s Ink. It’s a nice website supported by some fantastic photography, I encourage you to have a look.

Visit photographersink.com.au

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 just completed the revamped website for Brisbane-based advertising agency Make Communications through my work at Cru Digital. Make are the guys behind the I (green heart) BNE and Bond University campaigns. I recommend watching a few of their TV and Radio reels.

This website was designed by Make themselves, I was given a week to develop it from scratch.

Make Communications Website

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.

Click to read the nitty gritty bits Read more

The latest project I’ve worked on at Cru Digital is the Katarzyna Group website.

The project launched today and is a great example of Actionscript 3 and AJAX working together to achieve the best of both worlds.

The design is attributed to Andrew Suggit at The Room, the PHP development to Cru’s Steven Miles.

You can view the website at: www.katarzyna.com.au