How Kitten Space Agency became a career launchpad

When Zac began studying engineering at university, he imagined a fairly traditional career path ahead. As he progressed, he realised that he wasn’t suited to the linear progression of engineering.

“It’s a very structured pathway through study and industry entry, and my brain doesn’t really work like that.”

Zac shifted into mathematics, completing postgraduate study at both the University of Waikato and Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland. Along the way, he focused on building practical, adaptable skills.

“I tried to focus on modelling and simulation, simulating real life with maths.”

That decision eventually led him somewhere he had never seriously considered: New Zealand’s game development industry.

Today, Zac works at video game studio RocketWerkz on a range of projects including Kitten Space Agency, a physically accurate spaceflight simulation game designed to make orbital mechanics and rocketry accessible to players. While the premise might sound whimsical on the surface, the simulation underneath is grounded in serious maths and physics.

Its attention to orbital mechanics and realistic spaceflight has attracted interest from people within the aerospace and space education sectors, including NASA, SpaceX, and Rocket Lab engineers.

The game recently won the Most Innovative Hi-Tech Creative Technology Solution category at the 2026 NZ Hi-Tech Awards. The awards highlighted the growing strength of New Zealand’s technology sector, which is now worth over $24 billion to the economy annually. Video games alone contribute a billion dollars to that total.

Although Zac is not a lifelong gamer, he quickly recognised how deeply mathematics and physics underpin game development.

“Pretty much all of video game development is built on top of maths,” he says.

RocketWerkz was co-founded by Dean Hall, known internationally for creating survival game DayZ. The company now employs over 50 people, with its head office based on the top floor of Auckland’s illustrious PwC tower. Zac joined the studio near the end of his PhD after RocketWerkz approached universities looking for people with strong maths and physics capability.

Initially, the company thought it needed a mathematician-programmer hybrid. The role evolved after conversations with Zac.

“What they wanted was somebody who could look at problems mathematically. Someone who could break physical phenomena down into assumptions and simplifications that could then be turned into systems inside the game.”

That work now involves applied research, experimentation and the kind of blue-sky thinking needed to make complex simulations more realistic, more efficient and sometimes entirely new.

“It’s a project designed to teach people about space physics. It’s cool to be able to draw on my experience teaching during my PhD.”

He says Kitten Space Agency has become a useful platform for turning complex space research into something people can see and interact with. One project involved simulating the rotation of asymmetric bodies in space, a problem that existed in academic research but had not been implemented analytically in a video game before.

To make it work, he combined ideas from multiple research papers into a new algorithm that could realistically model the movement inside the game, work that has since been turned into an academic paper.

Zac believes more students should understand the breadth of opportunities within game development and the wider creative technology sector.

“Game development pulls together businesspeople, programmers, mathematicians and physicists but also artists and writers. You have storytellers and people thinking about the psychology of gaming and how people will respond to things. It’s one of the few industries that brings all those worlds together.”

He also sees value in staying open to unexpected career directions.

“You can’t really rest on credentials alone. A lot of opportunities come from talking to people, building relationships and being open to things you didn’t originally plan for. It turns out there are careers out there you don’t even know exist yet.”

An alpha version of the game is available for free at www.ahwoo.com.