How Australian English Compares to British and American English
10 November 2025 | TEFL International Vietnam | TESOL Essay
I’ve heard English described as three languages in a trench coat that beat up other languages in alleyways and rifle through their pockets for spare vocabulary. While that describes its origins, that doesn’t account for its many dialects. Most commonly taught in TESOL are British and American English. As an Australian, this puts me in an interesting situation: Australian English draws from both, but sometimes does its own thing. Read more…
Game Review: Destiny 2‘s Starcrossed Exotic Mission
26 January 2024 | Job Application | Game Review
In week 3 of Destiny 2’s Season of the Wish, Bungie unveiled the Exotic mission Starcrossed for the exotic strand bow Wish-Keeper. For my review of this mission, I discussed the story, visuals, audio, mechanics, level design, and any bugs or issues I encountered. Read more…
The Genres of Omelas
15 November 2020 | Swinburne University | Literary Analysis Essay
In The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin depicts a utopia dependent on the isolation and suffering of one child. In this essay, I discussed how Omelas is utopian and dystopian fiction, argued that Omelas is fantasy, and discussed its coverage of the theme of ethics present in all three genres. Read more…
Analysing the Structure, Plot and Protagonists of The Natural Way of Things
12 June 2020 | Swinburne University | Literary Analysis Essay
In Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, twelve young women who were involved in different sex scandals have been captured and imprisoned for unknown reasons at a secret compound somewhere in Australia. In this essay, I analysed the novel’s structure and plot in relation to narrative tension, discussed the comparative importance of its two protagonists, and analysed their character arcs. Read more…
Briefing Paper: Diversity in the ICT Workplace
26 March 2020 | Swinburne University | ICT Report
Australia is rapidly becoming more culturally and demographically diverse, and Australia’s workforce will follow suit as legislative pressure, market forces and demand for skilled workers lower the barrier to entry for minorities. Consequently, organisations will need strategies to manage and harness diversity. In this brief, I discussed the benefits and challenges of ICT workplace diversification, and how to harness it. Read more…
Get the Fog Out Post-Mortem
10 March 2020 | Swinburne University | Programming Report
In 2019 I contributed to the development of Get the Fog Out, an RTS game where you seek to repair your ship and escape a desolate planet before a hostile fog can kill you. In this report, I dissected what data structures and software patterns I used in my code and why, and discussed whether those choices were optimal or if I would do things differently a second time around. Read more…
Enter the Arena: Magic: The Gathering Arena Software Evaluation
3 November 2019 | Swinburne University | Game Analysis Essay
Magic: The Gathering Arena is Magic: The Gathering’s latest digital incarnation and a new entrant into the world of digital trading card games. In this essay, I explored Arena’s efforts “to create the deepest, richest digital card game on the market” and “to create a version of Magic that’s as much fun to watch as it is to play”, and how those efforts impact the user experience. Read more…
Usability Comparison: Magic: The Gathering vs Yu-Gi-Oh!
25 September 2019 | Swinburne University | Game Analysis Essay
The Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card games feature similar cards. However, there are small but cumulative differences in their layout and design that allow Magic cards to convey their flavour and function to players better than Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Read more…
Magic: The Panacea for Gamers’ Needs
8 June 2019 | Swinburne University | Game Analysis Essay
Originally devised to gather the funds to produce another game, Magic: the Gathering invented the trading card game genre. Twenty five years later, Magic is still thriving under by Wizards of the Coast, with over twenty million players and billions of cards printed. In this piece, I discussed how Magic attracts and retains players by addressing all of Barbaros Bostan’s categories of gamers’ needs. Read more…
Restrictions Breed Creativity
24 May 2019 | Swinburne University | Media Analysis Essay
Creativity is broadly defined as “the production of ideas or solutions that are novel and useful”. “Many people believe that the more options available [to creators], the more creative a person can be”. This is claim has little ground to stand on when it comes to constraints and creative technique, as evidenced by the many ways artists use constraints in creative practice, and the creativity that arises from restrictions in other contexts. Read more…
Unit Testing
31 October 2018 | Swinburne University | Programming Report
What is unit testing? What are its advantages and disadvantages? What types of software development does it work best for? And what should you do to get the most out of your unit tests? Read more…
Archmage(s): Twine Game Report
30 October 2018 | Swinburne University | Game Design Reflection Report
A reflective report examining how I made the Twine game Archmage(s), discussing my inspiration(s) for the game, the research I conducted, how I executed on my premise, and the results of several playtests during the game’s development. Read more…
Agile Backlogs
13 October 2018 | Swinburne University | Programming Report
What are agile backlogs? How do they differ from software requirements? How do agile teams use backlogs and what impact does that have? And how should you ensure your agile backlogs are fit for purpose? Read more…
Requirements in Agile Software Development
6 October 2018 | Swinburne University | Programming Report
What are software development requirements? What are user stories and functional requirements? How are they used and what are the impacts of good and bad requirements in agile software development? And how do you create good requirements for agile software development? Read more…
Requirements in Traditional Software Development
16 September 2018 | Swinburne University | Programming Report
What are software development requirements? What are the impacts of good and bad requirements? And how do you create high-quality requirements? Read more…
Merge Conflicts
13 September 2018 | Swinburne University | Programming Report
What is version control? What is branching and merging? What are merge conflicts? And how can you fix them? Read more…
Halo 4: Rampant Defence Mechanisms
5 September 2018 | Swinburne University | Game Analysis Essay
In 2012, Microsoft Studios released 343 Industries’ first major gamic addition to the Halo canon: Halo 4, which sees the Master Chief and Cortana struggle against a new Forerunner threat and Cortana’s rampancy. In this essay, I outlined what rampancy is and discussed Cortana’s symptoms in relation to Freud’s psychodynamic framework of defence mechanisms. Read more…
Comparing Programming Languages: C# vs Object Pascal
19 October 2017 | Swinburne University | Programming Report
What types of programming languages are C# and Object Pascal? How are they similar? How do they differ? And where does one excel where the other is lacking? Read more…
Object Oriented Programming Principles
27 September 2017 | Swinburne University | Programming Report
What is object oriented programming? What are programming objects? What do abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism mean? And how might you use object oriented programming to solve a problem? Read more…
Passenger or Builder: Ticket to Ride Analysed with Schell’s Tetrad
25 August 2017 | Swinburne University | Game Analysis Essay
Ticket to Ride is a game that attempts to blend its mechanics and aesthetics to reinforce its story to create a fun, combining several parts of Jesse Schell’s elemental tetrad to create an engaging play experience. Though its aesthetics and mechanics do reinforce its story and promote an enjoyable experience, they can convey a very different impression of Ticket to Ride’s story if one neglects to read it beforehand. Read more…
What Goes Into a Program?
23 April 2017 | Swinburne University | Programming Report
What is a program? How does it use data? How is a program controlled through code? And how is that code broken up into manageable sections? Read more…
Chess and Caillois – Exploring Chess Using Caillois’ Four Categories of Games
22 April 2017 | Swinburne University | Game Analysis Essay
In 1958, when Roger Caillois published the essay ‘The Classification of Games’ in his book ‘Man, Play and Games’, he provided the world with four significant tools for describing games: agon, alea, ilinx and mimicry. Chess is one of the most popular and revered strategy games in modern history. In this essay, I explored the game of chess in terms of each of Caillois’ four “tenets of game design”, illustrating how each affords players a distinct experience in each game of chess. Read more…
Sam Huffer 