Mobile Game Development with Unity

“If you want to build any kind of game for mobile platforms, you’ve got
to take a look at Unity. This book is an excellent, thorough, and
seriously fun guide to putting together gameplay in one of the best game
engines out there for indie developers.”

– Adam Saltsman, Creator of “Canabalt” and “Overland” at Finji

“The best way to learn how to use a game engine is by getting your hands
dirty and building your own projects. In this book, Paris and Jon guide
you through the creation of two radically different games, giving you
invaluable hands-on experience with a wide range of Unity’s features.”

– Alec Holowka, Lead Developer of “Night in the Woods” and “Aquaria” at
Infinite Ammo

“This book changed my life. I now feel inner peace, and I’m pretty sure
I can see through time.”

– Liam Esler, Game Developers’ Association of Australia

Our new book is (almost) out! You can read it on Safari, or buy it on Amazon, or at your favourite bookseller!

Unity Book

The first Early Release of our latest book is now available from O’Reilly: Mobile Game Development with Unity. We’re incredibly excited about this release; this is a book we’ve been dreaming of writing for many, many years, and we’ve finally had the chance to do so. Thanks to our amazingly patient editors, Rachel, who let us write this book, and Brian, who is making sure it’s as awesome as possible!

The new book covers game development with Unity, the increasingly-popular game development environment and game engine. We teach a little touch of game design, the fundamentals of Unity, and then we teach you how to build two full games: “Gnome’s Well”, a 2D game similar to Angry Birds, or Flappy Bird, and “Rock Fall”, a 3D space-asteroid shooting game.

The games built through the book are a lot of fun, and we’ve put a lot of thought into crafting games that are both representative of common, successful games in the mobile world, and contain enough interesting challenges for developers, artists, and the like, that they represent a valid real-world game development experience.

The first Early Release of the book contains early drafts of the chapters that explore the creation of both games, Gnome’s Well and Rock Fall, as well as a skeleton of the first chapter, which outlines the basics of Unity. The next Early Release, which we hope to have ready sometime in mid-December, will contain drafts of the Scripting chapter, and a completed draft of the first chapter.

We’re looking forward to seeing what people build after reading the book, and working through the games we teach in it. We’re really excited at the prospect of helping more people get into game development!

You can buy the Early Release over on the O’Reilly website. Buying it gets you all updates during the Early Release process, as well as the final copy of the book. If you have any questions, suggestions for things to add/cover, or find something unclear in the book, please don’t hesitate to email us: unitybook@secretlab.com.au. We’re so excited about this book, and can’t wait to improve it, finish it, and get more releases out for it!

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!