Level Up was my team's submission to the 2019 100k Velocity Challenge Grand Finals. This is a competition at the University of Auckland where participants compete for a share of 100k by creating a fully developed business startup pitch and plan.
"New Zealand's new and emerging game development studios are missing out. Yet, their success is key to achieving the goal of a billion dollar export industry by 2024. Level Up's mission is to provide the business development support and acceleration they need to successfully export creative IP and join the ranks of trailblazing studios proving that games can be a sustainable success."
These are the 2019 100k Velocity Challenge pitch slides for Level Up.
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My role during the four weeks leading to the finals was in helping develop the business plan, specifically the marketing and community management aspects. I also designed the branding and related media, including the pitch deck above. The pitch was designed in After Effects and uses a custom web app to manage timing during the presentation.
It was fantastic being a part of this team, as well as the larger Velocity Challenge community group, and I look forward to next year.
This year I had the opportunity to help organise and host the 7th annual Kiwijam. Kiwijam is NZ's largest game jam, and this year over 200 participants joined in from Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch to make games in just 48 hours.
In Auckland, we coordinated with the University of Auckland to host the event in the Science Centre Foyer. This space provided a large working area for the teams to collaborate in, and despite some technical challenges (such as having to do power runs for each table), the event ran very smoothly.
This year was the largest in Kiwijam's history, and we had 110 registered participants show up to work in our space! It's been a pleasure working with everyone involved, and I look forward to hosting more events like this in the future.
The intro video above was created by myself and is the first time I've produced motion graphics or created an event intro. Despite some time constraints and compromises, I'm thrilled with the result and reception from each location.
Kiwijam 19 AKL was sponsored by Red Bull and Amazon Alexa, and supported by the University of Auckland through club grants.
GovHack is a 48-hour data science challenge aimed at making public government data more accessible and bringing to light innovative ways to use it. The long-term goal of Govhack is to help encourage the release of more of this data by demonstrating these uses.
When Govhack returned to New Zealand after taking a break in 2018, I decided to put up my hand to help host the event in Auckland. This year marks the fourth year I have been a part of GovHack, and my first time hosting the event.
Out of the 50 registered participants, we had four teams come together and build projects spanning from political transparency to mental health awareness.
My role in coordinating the event was supported by the wonderful Oliver Li from the UoA Data Science Club as well as Fiona Lai, who both did a fantastic job of organising volunteers and helping during the weekend. I also regularly worked with the national New Zealand GovHack team in Northland, Hamilton, Taradale, Wellington, and Whanganui to make the best event possible for everyone.
Out of our four teams, two teams placed in the national prizegiving and were given flights and accommodation to the awards in Whanganui.
I very much look forward to working with the team again next year for GovHack 2020.
Werewolf Receipt is a tool for Windows (Linux and Mac in alpha) which allows anyone with a receipt printer to automatically randomly generate, assign, and print the cards to popular party games (for example, werewolf). A number of optional cards and rules are included for Werewolf, Mafia and Avalon.
I often end up helping out at or running a number of after school activities and events. One thing that’s always a winner is playing board and card games. The issue doing this is that it can be hard to keep track of the cards after a day, and kids often have trouble learning the rules. I made this tool to help with that.
The goal of werewolf receipt is to make it super quick and easy to print a card game on the spot – in a way which means that lost cards can be replaced, and worn cards can be reprinted. It also acts as a way for people to potentially try out new games before they buy them, and share variations or alterations on the original ruleset (such as new cards).
Why?
The initial reason this tool was created is that it helped me justify owning a receipt printer.
Beyond that, I wanted an easy way to generate the cards for Werewolf in situations where I don’t trust people to give back cards or where I can’t borrow a copy of the game.
As well as this, the fact that the cards are printed on the spot means that we can add things to the game that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. Right now that includes a list of traits that may appear on your card, which helps spice up the game. Any trait can go with any card, and the chance of one appearing can be configured.
All up, a cheap receipt printer from your friendly local international internet shopping website costs around $15-20 NZD including shipping (or $10-15 USD). A decent roll of thermal paper costs a dollar or two. A standard copy of Werewolf costs around $30 imported in NZ ($40 locally) or $12USD in the USA. Thus, on price alone it is usually cheaper to buy a receipt printer and download this app than buy a traditional copy of Werewolf.
Finally, having the app (and therefore game) open sourced means anyone can come in and tweak card ratios, traits, and add & edit cards. These tweaks can then be sent out to anyone using the app and in doing so allow for an “over the air” update of a physical card game without the need to actually buy anything.
Update: With the results of the competition now available, this project won in New Zealand, then with with one other school went on to enter the international competition and win Honorable Mention (Ctrl #2017017).
Meeting Hall was our submission to the International Mathematics Modelling Challenge.
Scenario: Hosting international meetings to further business or scientific efforts has become common in our increasingly globalized world. This means that individuals from all corners of the world are brought together to do intellectually demanding work as a team. When individuals travel long distances through multiple time zones, they experience a physiological condition known as jet lag. This is defined as the feeling of tiredness or confusion that air travellers suffer when the destination has a different time to the source location. As these meetings can be relatively short, minimising this jet lag is essential to maximising the overall productivity of the meeting. Therefore, a location needs to be chosen for each individual meeting that reduces the total amount of jet lag experienced by the group.
This here is a code implementation of the algorithms we built as an answer to this problem. We have focused on making our algorithm as general as possible, and have attempted to rely as little as possible on external data sources (such as air routes) as the large amount of data we require on such things makes requesting data from an external site impractical for a live solution.
You can view the source code for our submission at our github page, as well as the original data source files and scripts used to convert the data to a useable form.
This tool works best on the latest version of Google Chrome, however the application MAY work on other browsers. This tool does not work on Internet Explorer or mobile devices.
FIREWISE was a short 2D action game developed for the 2018 GMTK Game Jam - a 48 hour competition with the theme of GENRE, but you can’t MECHANIC.
Made by a small team of students at the University of Auckland, the goal was to introduce and build skills in both teamworking and game development. My personal involvement was both in the development of the game as well as organising the event within the University - making sure that everyone was fed, watered, and that they had a place to work (for the second night overnight).
All assets (including many that were not released) were developed during the 48 hours excluding some environmental textures.