“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
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.
We’re running online Swift programming training with our publisher, O’Reilly Media, in a week or two (July 20 and 21, US West Coast time). You can learn more and register over on the O’Reilly website. We’re really excited! Attendees will all receive an electronic copy of our new Swift programming book, Learning Swift.
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:Â 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!
The gist of it is: you’ll join us live online for a day of Swift programming, where we’ll teach you the language, how to use it for iOS (or OS X) programming, and where to learn more. Everyone will get a video of the training afterwards, as well as an ebook copy of our brand new Learning Swift book.
OSCON in Amsterdam is coming up in a month or so, and I’m really, really looking forward to it. So much so, that I thought I’d write up some thoughts on why I enjoy going to OSCON.
Adding Europe (in addition to the USA –– Portland earlier this year, and Austin in May 2016) to the lineup is a big move for OSCON (it’s been in Europe before, but it didn’t run every year afterwards). This year, at OSCON in Portland, which ran in July, the tracks of the conference changed for the first time in a long time.
Previously, the conference was designed around mostly-languaged based tracks, and was essentially a collection of disparate conferences for different clusters of nerds. It was great, but it wasn’t how the community worked, or how nerds-in-the-real-world work any more.
In July, OSCON in Portland was structured around the idea that open-source and the software, tools, and languages (that OSCON has always been about) are actually everywhere, being used by everyone. The tracks got updated to reflect more tangible, practical things, that might span languages and nerd-clusters.
The result of this is that OSCON (in Portland, earlier this year, in Amsterdam next month, and in Austin next year) has tracks relating to things like security, and privacy, scaling, devices, mobility, architecture, design, and other real-life, more pragmatic concepts. This is a really good thing. Not only does it mean that you meet lots and lots of people, who –– shock horror! –– might use, espouse, and prefer different languages, tools, and frameworks than you, but it also means the conference works like the real-world does: security topics for one language are not unique to that language, performance at scale on the web isn’t unique to one backend stack, and good, sensible mobile app design isn’t unique to one mobile platform (to name but three examples).
I really enjoyed OSCON in Portland this year, and the new track structure contributed to that in no small way. OSCON in Amsterdam follows a similar philosophy, so I’m expecting it to be pretty excellent.
Another of the big reasons that OSCON is special is the way it connects the people using, building, and working with new, amazing, important, and often just plain interesting software (and hardware!) with the companies who rely on this software, teach this software, or otherwise participate in the community.
This mountain is in Portland, but Austin and Amsterdam look just as cool.Companies often have a bad reputation at big conferences, especially corporate conferences like OSCON that are not directly run by the community –– but OSCON does a good job, with very few exceptions, of making sure your interactions with the companies sponsoring and attending the event are very much on your own terms.
OSCON represents such a valuable intersection between the community-run events, which are often still clustered by language, or technology (despite their deep wish that they were all polyglot events), and the actual real world that’s using all this technology –– which, like it or not, is mostly companies –– and it does a damn fine job of it. This role as a meeting point for community and enterprise is a very underrated (and little-discussed) aspect of OSCON, and is one of the core reasons why it’s one of the only two conferences that I go back to every single year.
Every year I learn things that are incredibly interesting, inspiring, or just plain or exciting, as well as things that directly improve my ability to be better at what I do every day. I also meet amazing people, and make new friends every year. I’ve also personally given talks on everything ranging from programming with Apple’s Swift language, to game design, to Kerbal Space Program.
I first went to OSCON in 2011. Some friends and colleagues and I, randomly on a whim, submitted a session on design best practices for mobile apps. It got accepted, much to our surprise, and we made our way to Portland. We’ve been presenting on mobile design at OSCON ever since. OSCON is an amazing amount of fun, and I can’t wait for Amsterdam (and Austin!)
*video not from OSCON, but it’s the same talk I saw at OSCON.
(My publisher, O’Reilly Media, also runs OSCON, so you probably can’t trust a word I say. But really, OSCON is pretty amazing, and this is just my blog post, and my words, so you should probably check out OSCON!)
Super awesome! Next week we’ll be running 
dev-ops, I don’t do any important software engineering or architecture –– I make games!, and I don’t know what a container-at-scale is, and I definitely don’t have a foundation), but every year I get a lot of out OSCON –– every year I’ve learnt mind-blowing things about everything from 
I first went to OSCON in 2011. Some friends and colleagues and I, randomly on a whim, submitted a session on design best practices for mobile apps. It got accepted, much to our surprise, and we made our way to Portland. We’ve been presenting on mobile design at OSCON ever since. OSCON is an amazing amount of fun, and I can’t wait for Amsterdam (and Austin!)
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison 