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

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 at YOW! Connected in Melbourne this week. It's been pretty awesome, and we've met lots of cool people doing awesome things with mobile and IoT. We gave two presentations!

The first was the latest update to our How Do I Game Design? session, covering just enough game design theory to make you dangerous. You can watch a video of this session from OSCON 2015:

The second was called Watch This Face, and covered the philosophical design differences between Android Wear and Apple's watchOS. You can grab the slides from Speaker Deck:

And, because apparently we can't get by without giving a plug for our books, don't forget to check out our new books; you can get them for 50% off with code WKIOS9.

We had a total blast at Unite Australia today in Melbourne. It's the first time that Unite has been run in Australia, and the Unity team was clearly really excited to be here. While much of the content was stuff thats already been announced at the main Unite conference, the Australian satellite conference was a great opportunity to get info straight from the developers.

The big announcement at the keynote was the availability of the first public beta of Unity 5. Unity 5 is looking huge, and is packed with very cool features and improvements to the workflow. One of the most interesting things, from our largely technical-artist-focused perspective, is the inclusion of an incremental workflow for global illumination. Global illumination makes for some fantastic looking scenes, but the main drawback has always been the problem of waiting for the system to finish baking the lights when you make a change.

Another huge new feature mentioned in the keynote is a brand new audio mixing system. This system is extremely configurable, and easy to tie into the scripting system. It looks like sound designers are going to have a much easier time designing really immersive environments, and we can't wait to get to play with it.

The single biggest new feature, our opinion, is already available. The new GUI system, which has been long-promised and became available in the betas of 4.6. The new GUI has to solve a lot of different problems, and be applicable on both desktop, mobile and console environments; additionally, the fact that there are a billion and one different screen resolutions out there can make a UI designer's life distinctly unpleasant. We're particularly taken with their approach to scaling UIs to meet this problem: design everything based on a "reference resolution", like 800x600, and give the system a fuzzy hint that it should try to prefer to preserve the width or height when the aspect ratio changes.

Another great new feature that's landing with Unity 5.0 is the WebGL deployment target. WebGL has become a lot more available over the last few years, and a plugin free method of getting games into the browser is totally awesome. We spent some time going through benchmarks, and the performance looks great. Expect web-based demos from us, and may other game developers, in the future. 

Things mostly wrapped up with a session on the future roadmap of Unity. The biggest takeaway that we got was their intent to make a larger number of their high-level features available as open source libraries. Both the new GUI layer and the new networking system are intended to go open source, and the team on stage made it very clear that this was a pattern that they plan to follow for more features.

We're really looking forward to playing with the 5.0 beta, and can't wait to pull it apart for inclusion into our upcoming O'Reilly Media book, Mobile Game Development with Unity. The next few months are going to be a lot of fun. Follow us here, and on Twitter @thesecretlab for updates.

We'll be running our popular iOS developer in Melbourne and Brisbane again in February 2014! Early Bird registrations are now open.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us.

This event has now passed! Our next training is in Sydney, February 2013!

We're exceptionally pleased to announce another training course! Join us for three days of intense iOS training in Melbourne, where you'll learn Objective-C and iOS development from the ground up. We'll be running the course from December 14 to 16, in the heart of Melbourne's CBD.

For more information, look no further than this here internet web page site link!