In Conversation with Rick Treweek, co-founder of BreakDesign

During my trip to Monte Carlo for the first Nokia Developers summit 2009, the Nokia-Adobe Open Screen Project announced the first five recipients, and surprisingly, one of them is BreakDesign, a Singaporean based company developing the Barking Seed platform for Flash-lite games on the mobile phone. In the next few months, I have asked around for this interesting stealth start-up and finally, in the recent Nokia One Connected World event in Kuala Lumpur, I managed to meet up with Rick Treweek, one of the co-founders of this interesting company. So, I spoke to Rick and he is generous to give us some time to be interviewed about the Barking Seed platform which they are developing for the Open Screen Award, the first flash lite game – Dawn of the Fly, his thoughts about the mobile apps space and experience working as a partner to Nokia’s developer ecosystem.

Bernard Leong: Hi Rick, great to have you here on SGE and congratulations on being the first 5 winners of the Nokia-Adobe Open Screen Award. Tell us about your background. What did you do before setting up BreakDesign?
Rick Treweek: Thanks! Its good to be here. Before setting up Breakdesign, I was working at a company in Cape Town, South Africa that created games and microsites for the UK music industry. This is where I met the other co – founder of Breakdesign, Stefan Wessels.

Bernard Leong: What is the story behind why you and your team set up BreakDesign?
Rick Treweek: I think the main reason for setting up Breakdesign was the passion we had for the work we did. Whilst working for another company we often did not like the fact that we had to push things out the door before they were nicely polished. So the only way to control this was to set up our own company.

Breakdesign was initially a web design company. The turning point in our company was when we released our first game in Flash Lite called Dawn Of The Fly, the game was created for fun to test this new technology. We released the game for free on a couple of sites and it spread to over 178 countries generating a lot of interest in Breakdesign . Still to this day if you search flash lite games on google our game comes out number 1 out of some 18 million hits.

Bernard Leong: What is the Barking Seed platform about which the first beta game which you are launching soon?
Rick Treweek: Barking Seed is going to be totally rocking! Basically it is a games community that is driven by people playing flash lite games that are “Barking Seed Enabled”. Every time you play one of these games you influence your profile in the community. The community will feature a massive scoring api that goes across all the games so the stats will be one of the main components of the world. For example, the most active country, most used weapon (device) etc. This is the very basics of the system, it will be growing a lot. The first game we will be launching is called “That Roach Game”, we have a thing for creating games with bugs!

Bernard Leong: What are the three most interesting features on the Barking Seed platform that you like your users to know about?
Rick Treweek:It’s hard to say which three stand out the most as I think each person will have a favorite aspect in the community. For me I guess the best features are that you can play for a country (You can change who you play for which will affect the country scoreboards). The fact that each time you play a game it adds to your community profile enabling you to play more games. Lastly I would say that all your games that you own will always be available to download from the community so even if you lose your device it would be easy to get all your games back.

Bernard Leong: What are the challenges in developing Flash related software on mobile phones? Do you foresee Flash being adopted by the other vendors (Google, Apple and Microsoft)?
Rick Treweek: I would say the biggest challenge is when working on client projects, the education that is needed for clients to understand the true power of flash lite.

I really think that Flash Lite is still going to explode in the market. We have always been big supporters of this tech and are constantly surprised by how few developers have sunk their teeth into it. It has such great potential not to mention the speed of development time compared to other technologies out there. I would say the biggest thing it offers is bridging the gap between creatives and technical developers which has always been very separated before. Flash Lite has already been adopted by many other vendors but I think to this day Nokia is one of the biggest and best supporters of Flash Lite.