Secret Lab is a games and creative technology studio located in Hobart, Australia, founded by Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison and Dr Jon Manning.
We’ve been enthusiastically building games, narrative experiences, and technology for culture, history, arts, storytelling, and beyond since 2008.
We’re the proud creators of Yarn Spinner, the interactive storytelling tool, and are currently working on the BAFTA- and IGF-winning Night in the Woods, as well as the Screen Tasmania-funded I Feel Fine.
We primarily work on our own creations, but if you’re lucky you can hire us to build games, interactive experiences, fancy apps, or to add features to, or support your integration of Yarn Spinner.
Our clients are as diverse as our games
We’ve built the official games for the beloved Australian children’s TV show, Play School, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
We’ve designed and built a creative and engaging piece of children’s entertainment to be used as in-flight entertainment for Qantas, one of the oldest and most respected airlines in the world.
We’ve built a game for the CSIRO, Australia’s national laboratory, to explore whether video games can help motivate people’s fitness.
In collaboration with the amazing National Museum of Australia, we’ve built The Museum Game, an interactive experience that has helped thousands of school children explore and engage with the museum’s collection.
Together with TasNetworks, the electricity transmission company for Tasmania, we designed and built Bill Shock, a game to help people understand how their appliance use impacts their energy costs.
With the pioneering CoRE Learning Foundation, we’ve built the award-winning Old as Dirt party games and the custom Minecraft: Education Edition game, Resource, Respond Rescue! to help teach the next generation of STEM-leaders.
But that’s just a sampling. We’ve built the official National Science Week apps for Australia for many years running, the Port Arthur Historic Site guide app, and we’ve worked on projects for clients that include Fastmail, the most amazing email provider on the planet, and Australian game development powerhouse, Mighty Games Group.
We’ve also written a slightly absurd number of books, and taught iOS development, game development, game design, and machine learning at conferences, events, and companies around the world.
Our narrative dialogue tool, Yarn Spinner, is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts, Epic MegaGames, New York University, and is used in thousands of games, including our BAFTA- and IGF-winning work on Night in the Woods.
And that’s just our work that’s not under an NDA…
Whether you need a creative installation, a game, strategy consultation, or a training event, contact us to discuss what we can do for you.
We build Yarn Spinner, which helps you create branching narrative and dialogue in games.
Yarn Spinner is easy for writers to use, and has powerful features for integrating your content straight into your game. It’s been used in thousands of games, including Night in the Woods, Lost in Random, and A Short Hike.
Get in touch with us to talk about hiring us to integrate Yarn Spinner into your game, add custom features to Yarn Spinner, and beyond.
We literally wrote the book on building games with Unity; apps for iOS, iPad OS and watchOS; programming with Swift; machine learning and more
Actually, we’ve written nearly 30 books. And we’re still writing more.
Our technical blog is at Secret Lab Institute.
Hire us or Contact us
Feel free to email us or use the form if you want to hire us to build a video game, an app, for Yarn Spinner consulting or custom features, or just want to say hello.
You can also just email us at lab AT secretlab.com.au
If you have a media inquiry, please visit the press kit page first.
You can also support Yarn Spinner on Patreon.