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Here is your first (very short) look at Night in the Woods for iOS

More to come.

Thanks, have a good day.

Love you, hope you're well. pic.twitter.com/zdtBvzny1D
— Finji (@FinjiCo) October 27, 2020

OSCON 2018

I’m super, super, super excited to be back at OSCON, my favourite conference, in Portland. This year you can find me at the following bits of OSCON:

Monday, 16 July 2018
- 1:30 PM “Open source game development with Godot” tutorial
Tuesday, 17 July 2018
- 1:30 PM “Machine overlord and you: Building AI on iOS with open source tools” tutorial
- 5:00 PM “The realities of weightloss” Ignite
Wednesday, 18 July 2018
- 3:15 PM “Learning Swift” book signing
Thursday, 19 July 2018
- 4:15 PM “Learning Swift with Playgrounds” session

You should also check out the following sessions, from my friends:

Night in the Woods

We’re making Night in the Woods for mobile. We’re very excited. The press is also very excited. Learn more on the Secret Lab website.

New content! Videos! Books!

We’ve been working with some awesome folks to build a great library of training material for game development with Unity.

These videos are designed to accompany and support our upcoming book, Mobile Game Development with Unity (also on Amazon and Safari).

Here’s what we’ve been working on:

Designing Games that People Want to Play (on Safari)
Getting Started with Game Development in Unity (on Safari)
Developing 3D Games with Unity (on Safari)
Creating 2D Games with Unity (on Safari)
Creating First-Person-Shooter (FPS) Games with Unity (on Safari)
Creating 3D VR Games with Unity (on Safari)
Creating Narrative Games with Unity (on Safari)
Just Enough Game Art (on Safari)
Getting Your Game Out There (on Safari)

If there’s no purchase available yet, there will be soon! Everything is available on Safari right now, though.

We’ve also got some new “Learning Path” videos, exclusively out on O’Reilly’s Safari platform:

Our newest books are also available now:

Learning Swift (on the latest Swift/iOS/macOS)
(also on Amazon and Safari)
The Kerbal Player’s Guide
(also on Amazon and Safari)
- Check out our talk “The Mun and Back”, from OSCON 2015 as well!

One of the best ways to look at all the training we write is on O’Reilly’s Safari platform (which has a free trial). It’s like Netflix for technical training and books.

Doing things the hard way

This year, Jon gave a talk at GDC called “Making Night in the Woods Better with Open Source”. In it, he talked about how Night in the Woods (which came out last month and you should totally go buy) used the open source process in its development.

Unlike most of our other talks, we did something a little ridiculous with this one – we built an entire presentation system, from scratch, into Night in the Woods. We’re actually pretty proud of this, and so we put together a video showing how it was done. Check it out!

Soon.

GovHack 2016

Over the last weekend I took place in GovHack 2016 at the Hobart site. This was the 4th time that I’ve participated in GovHack, and – as usual – it was an excellent event! I formed (what is now becoming the usual) team with Jon, Tim, Josh, Rex, Seb, Matthew, and Arabella, and we built a game out of the data-sets.

The game we built involves players taking control of news readers on flying news desks, grabbing images and matching them to headlines. It’s called Beat the Press and you can learn more about it on the project website, and through the video we made:

Thanks to my awesome team members for working so hard on art, music, data-wrangling, copy editing, video production, programming, design, and game design over the weekend! Thanks also to Craig Clark for hosting a fabulous event, as well as the other volunteers in Hobart, and everywhere else!

Games party!

TasGDS and Backyard.SK ran DIY: Games to Inspire, a games party, in Hobart last night. It was amazing! Photos are up on Facebook (public link, no login needed!)

TasJam Game Jam

Over the weekend we participated on the first TasJam Game Jam. TasJam is a statewide game jam event, held simultaneously in Hobart, Launceston, and Burnie, and was organised by the Tasmanian Game Development Society.

The weekend was absolutely fantastic, and the organisers did a brilliant job of running the jam, and the mentors/judges who came down from Melbourne –– Kamina (from Tin Man Games), Lauren, and Katie (both from Lumi Consulting) –– were all really insightful, and such a positive presence at the jam. It was a great environment to get things done in, and there was a lot of great feedback and ideas shared amongst participants.

Jon and I spent our time repurposing assets from one of the games we’re building at Secret Lab –– Gnome’s Well –– and building a single-stick multiplayer shooter game. The game involves wizard hats waking up to prevent the the wizard’s treasure from being stolen by invading gnomes using drone-copters. We think it’s pretty fun, and it came out really well for such a short build.

It was a great opportunity for us to learn how to use game controllers, which are not something that we’ve ever used before! We were also super-impressed when we rebuilt the game (which we built using Unity) for iOS, and it ran flawlessly on an iPad Air 2 using MFi game controllers.

You can find more pictures, as well as videos and photos on the Secret Lab Tumblr. I also took a lot of photos at the event, and you can find those on my Flickr. TasJam used itch.io for submissions, so don’t forget to check out all the awesome games there.

You can download our prototype if you have a Mac and some PS3/PS4 controllers to pair to it, as well! Thanks to Jason and Ducky for organising such an awesome event!