Night in the Woods is coming to iOS in 2018!

We're thrilled to announce that we've partnered with Infinite Fall and Finji in porting Night in the Woods to iOS. We've been working on it for a while now, and we're incredibly excited to say that it's coming in 2018.

Porting a game like NITW to mobile devices is interesting for two reasons. First, a mobile phone often has much less memory than PCs or consoles, and a less powerful graphics chip, so we need to do all kinds of things to make the game fit. Second, bringing any game that was designed for controllers or keyboards to a touchscreen means you've got to completely re-design the game to account for stuff like the player's hands covering up the screen, and the fact that you can't physically feel your controls.

You might have seen Jon posting about his work over the last several months on a tool for compressing sprites. This tool is part of the set of technologies we've been developing to support the port, and we'll be sharing more about it in the near future.

NITW also uses Yarn Spinner, our open source tool for creating and managing interactive dialogue in games. We're thrilled with the community response to Yarn Spinner, and improvements that result from our porting work will be merged into the main project.

If you're going to GCAP 2017, come and see Jon talk about the port in more detail at 3PM on Tuesday, October 24th (TODAY!), where he'll also be sharing tips and tricks on how to make your game the best possible experience on iOS devices.

For more info, be sure to follow us on Twitter, at @thesecretlab, @parisba and @desplesda. We share lots of interesting behind the scenes stuff!

Talk more soon. This is going to be fun. For questions or inquiries, please email lab@secretlab.com.au

Join us for online training! Free for Safari members, and running on September 22 and 23. Learn more and signup on Safari.

Beginning with a quick primer on Swift 4 programming, we’ll move quickly to cover a collection of common design patterns used for iOS 11 development. Then we’ll explore the details of Swift and its standard library, including some of the more sophisticated language features, as well as useful algorithms, and UX/visual patterns used by top iOS applications.

We’ll use Playgrounds on macOS, in Xcode, for much of this workshop; Playgrounds are a revolutionary interactive way to work with and learn Swift.

This workshop covers the newest Swift, Swift 4, due out with iOS 11 later this year, along with Xcode 9, the toolkit used for working with iOS apps. More information and signup on the Safari website. This training is free for Safari members.

We're running another of our awesome on-site training workshops in Melbourne soon! Join us for iOS 11 App Development with Swift 4, three days of hands-on training in Melbourne, running in late-August.

For the first time ever, we're offering a "Pay What You Can Afford" ticket type! 

If you have any questions, feel free to email us: events@secretlab.com.au

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

These videos, soon to be joined by a series on game promotion, 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)

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

• UIKit Dynamics for iOS
• Constraints in iOS
• Table Views in iOS
• Getting started with Swift on the iPad
• The Basics of Designing 3D Art
  with Blender and Unity

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.

This year, we gave a talk at GDC called “Making Night in the Woods Better with Open Source”. In it, we 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!

The talk from GDC is also available online, and we've embedded it below:

Our new book is out! Learn about space, astrophysics, and Kerbal Space Program, the best realistic space program simulator! Grab it now! It's also available on Amazon!