Speaking

As Unity’s Technical Evangelist for Australia and New Zealand I was part of the keynote at a 500-person conference three years running, ran roadshows on both sides of the Tasman, and delivered workshops and training to hundreds of developers, including partner training at the Australian HoloLens 2 launch with Microsoft. I’ve taught rendering and game programming to everyone from primary schoolers to conference halls, and teaching is the part I’ve never wanted to stop doing.

Before Unity I taught games programming in classrooms:

• At the Academy of Interactive Entertainment I taught C++, OpenGL and physics in the university games programming course.
• At Victoria University’s TAFE division I wrote and ran an introduction to games programming for designers.
• At Footscray Primary School I started and ran an after-school games-making class.
• At Transmission Games I led a group of programmers through C#/.NET training.

A selection of recorded talks:

Extending the Lightweight Render Pipeline (Unite)

Custom render passes, shaders and post-processing in Unity’s LWRP (now URP). Companion code on GitHub.

Mobile AR Design: From Start to Finish (Augmented World Expo)

Design lessons from building markerless augmented reality at Dekko.

AR Foundation: Beyond the Basics

Going deeper with Unity’s augmented reality framework.

Introduction to Shaders

Shaders from first principles, for developers who have been avoiding them.

Beyond the Controller (Freeplay Independent Games Festival)

A panel on what happens to game experiences when the controller goes away.

SouthStart (interview)

Mentions

Conference papers

Sparke, C. and Sietsma, J. “An Update on Evaluating Sound Pressure Levels of Noise Sources in Busy Noise Environments with Deep Learning.” Proceedings of INTER-NOISE 2026, Adelaide, August 2026.