I recently took part in the annual SA Game Jam 2025, organised by Free Lives. It was either a 72-hour or 48-hour affair, starting on Friday 19th September and finishing on Monday 22nd September. I wasn’t really planning to take part as I had a fairly busy weekend lined up, but started messing around on Saturday – a 2-frame walk cycle turned into a 4-frame walk cycle which turned into an 8-frame walk cycle… I didn’t work on Sunday, and finished the game on Monday. To my absolute delight, I had something I was pretty proud of! MONS – a short interactive experience in which I got to experiment with Unity’s pixel perfect camera for the olde 8bit retro look, harnessed the power of prefabs, and a little story to go along with it. You’re a Kaiju, and you forgot your car keys back up on land from the last…

Dear peoples of the world. Please join me in this rather plump update. We’re almost 3/4 of the way through 2025 but this will suffice as a mid-2025 update. Bru & Boegie: METEORITE My latest animated Bru & Boegie adventure is finally finished! I started writing it 5 years ago in 2020 thanks to some development funding from NFVF, then it took a couple years to get production funding from NFVF, and in this year 2025 it is completed! By the time I was finished with the animatic the length of the short film ran 20 minutes, but I whittled it down to a neat 10-minute short – unfortunately leaving quite a lot of cool stuff on the cutting-room floor but it was already a pretty ambitious project. I animated the whole thing myself in TVPaint, Mind’s Eye Creative kindly helped me with the admin side of things, and a…

I’m thrilled to announce the follow-up to Bru & Boegie: Episode 1 – Get da MILK! In this comedy point-and-click adventure, Bru is tasked with getting SUGAR for his coffee, but someone or something is stealing all of Earth’s sugar. It’s up to YOU to figure out what the big conspiracy is, save Earth, and with any luck, get some SUGAR for your coffee. The adventure takes Bru all over the place – more locations in KiffTown and beyond, and he even goes to space. Wild. The game can be Wishlisted on Steam!  If you’re on Steam, please do so – it’ll help give the game more visibility when the demo and game eventually release, and you’ll be notified when each drops. Thanks! The background Unbeknownst to most, I’ve been beavering away at the second game, which follows directly from Episode 1. I wanted to get the Steam page ready so people…

[Last edited: 18 June 2025]A reflection on three years building in the Web3 gaming space. Preamble Having left a Web3 gaming company last year – where I unexpectedly found myself as co-founder and Creative Director – I originally intended this essay to be a 5 minute talk to share crypto gaming insights with traditional game developers. It became a sprawling 19-page draft that sat unfinished for a while. I recently used Claude.ai and ChatGPT to help condense it by about 70% into something more readable. There’s surprisingly little documentation on this stuff, which is odd for a space that prides itself on transparency and open source ideals. Maybe it’s because the space is so new, or maybe we just didn’t dig deep enough. Either way, I hope this fills a gap for anyone considering jumping into working in crypto gaming. With transparency often being a championed core principle at the…

Allo! Been thinking about how much a little game jam from almost 10 years ago has led to, and wanted to celebrate Frog Smashers as well as my main collaborator on the project, Ruan Rothmann. One shouldn’t take things for granted – one of those things is a little couch co-op pixel brawler game called Frog Smashers that I helped create back in 2016. Here’s a 2018 post I wrote about it. Off to The Island! In 2016 or so I was giving a talk about Moosebox (my animated 8bit pixel art pilot set in a videogame world) at a Joburg games festival called ‘Amaze Fest’. The talk went well. Thereafter, I was kindly invited to take part in Game Jam Island; a collaborative game-making project set in Mauritius hosted and organised by Free Lives – a Cape Town games studio that made BroForce. I decided to just say ‘yes’….

Ah man. The launch of ‘Bru & Boegie: Episode 1 – Get da MILK!’ went far better than I could have hoped for! 🥲 I’m thrilled and relieved. The successful launch means a lot, particularly after what feels like a couple misses with the past few projects, though I’m grateful to those projects for the valuable learnings. I’ve created this as a post-launch celebration and analysis. Stats Since its launch on the 3rd April 2025 (about 2 weeks ago), and with literally $0 in paid marketing (I don’t even have social media channels anymore besides YouTube where I posted the trailer), the game’s stats are as follows: After Day 1 I think the browser play & downloads stats cruised past my optimistic pre-launch 1-month estimates. 😮 What worked I developed a playable prototype within a week or two, shared that in the Makers Massive Discord and got some great initial…