Actuator

Technical direction for games and products

Trading as Actuator Digital, the firm works with founders who need an idea turned into a game or a digital product. It describes its work as senior technical direction and development from first concept through to release, and it offers help at several scales: a short technical report that sets a practical path, co-development that adds senior capacity to a team for a defined challenge, and full delivery of a larger game or product over months or years.

The services span product and brand design, prototyping, software development and website building. The company also produces high-quality prototypes that a client can use to raise funding for a project. Design work includes branding, concept development, wireframing, graphic design and two- and three-dimensional digital art.

Work across games, tools and apps

The portfolio runs from games to industrial and specialist software. Among the games is a medieval social deduction party game in which villagers try to survive while hidden monsters blend into the town, and an arcade-inspired virtual reality shooter with minigames and modes for players of different skill levels. The firm has also worked on a virtual reality version of an assassination game for the Meta Quest 3, and on a first-person action adventure set on an alien planet.

Outside entertainment, the firm has built a payload monitoring system that gives loader operators live data against truck targets, with in-cab feedback and daily reporting for face shovels, backhoes and wheel loaders. It has also made autonomous livestock mustering software that uses drones, computer vision and herding algorithms in real paddock conditions, and a drone-training simulation that teaches piloting and cattle mustering in a virtual setting.

Other work includes a fixed interactive puzzle exhibit at a children's research institute in Australia, a virtual reality career exploration app that lets students explore workplaces through job shadowing, and a companion app for a therapeutic dog massage bed that schedules sessions and sends personalized usage notices.

Delivery method

Work is delivered in Agile sprints with regular checkpoints, so the client sees progress as it happens. Projects can be billed on a time and materials basis or at a fixed total. The company says it writes modular, efficient code, advises on which platforms and languages suit each project, and provides analytics, tracking and support after launch. The work is done by a small in-house team of full-stack specialists rather than outsourced.