At Linux.conf.au 2016, in Geelong, we presented a talk on our experiences building video games at open data hackathons, such as GovHack. The video and slides are now available! The video is available on YouTube, and embedded below, and the slides are available on SpeakerDeck.
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.
“When I realised what the engineers had done, my head LITERALLY exploded…,” said Jon to the other Kerbonauts, waiting for their turn on the Kerbtrifuge, an odd part of training that persisted even though it was universally agreed that G forces had no effect on Kerbal physiology.
Paris would normally have a great rejoinder to his, but he had just entered the training capsule. The rest of the crew were eager not to think about that, and were swapping horror stories to keep their mind off things.
“That’s nothing,” said Tim. “There was one time when they confused apogee and perigee, and rather than a nice circular orbit I found myself heading out past the orbit of Jool. It took me SIX YEARS to get back home.”
Tim had been with the programme for less than a year, but that didn’t stop him embellishing stories like the rest of the crew.
“Al, how about you?” asked Paul, who was next in line for “endurance training,” and was clearly fidgeting with nervousness, “what’s your scariest moment?”
Al looked up from the console which he was soldering. “Mine? It was when they decided that even though more boosters had been added, it still wasn’t enough. I was in a ship made of nothing but boosters.”
From the room next door, the sound of the Kerbtrifuge spinning up could be heard. Everyone held their breath, Paris’s cry could be heard through the thin metal walls…
“WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Join Paris, Jon, Tim, Paul, and Alasdair as they regale you with tales of their adventures in the Kerbal Space Program, the increasingly popular and disturbingly realistic space programme simulator game enjoyed by geeks around the world. Learn how and why you should go to space, and what you can learn from it! Science will be involved.
We just finished another fantastic week at OSCON 2014 – this was our fourth year attending and speaking at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, and we (as usual) had an absolutely amazing time. It's rapidly becoming one of our favourite conferences.
We presented twice at OSCON this year: a session version of our How Do I Game Design? workshop, and our three-hour Android-focused mobile design tutorial (along with Chris Neugebauer, as usual).
The slides for How Do I Game Design? are available now on Speaker Deck. Interesting and related links for attendees are:
- Squire, 2006. From Content to Context: Videogames as Designed Experience
- Schell, 2008. The Art of Game Design
- LeBlanc, Hunicke and Zubek, 2004: MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research
- Koster, 2004. A Theory of Fun for Game Design
- Game Definitions: gamedefinitions.com
- 8KindsOfFun – Marc LeBlanc: 8kindsoffun.com
The games we mentioned in the talk are:
The slides for our mobile design tutorial Unfortunately Design Tutorial Has Stopped ... and other ways to infuriate people with mobile apps are available now on Speaker Deck. Interesting and related links for attendees are:
- Google's Creative Vision for Android
- Google's Material Design
- Google's Company Philosophy
- Action Bar Icon Pack
Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions!
We ran our game design workshop at OSCON 2013 this year! Thanks to all who came - we hope you had an excellent time! Here are links to the books and papers we talked about at the end of the presentation:
- Squire, 2006. From Content to Context: Videogames as Designed Experience
- Schell, 2008. The Art of Game Design
- LeBlanc, Hunicke and Zubek, 2004: MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research
- Koster, 2004. A Theory of Fun for Game Design
If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch!
Jon from Secret Lab presenting at Swipe Conference 2012
Last week in Sydney was the second ever Swipe Conference –– an Australian iOS and OS X developer event. Secret Lab was again in attendance and, as always, the Apple developer community was great fun to hang out with and learn from –– and the organisers, Jake MacMullin, Mark Aufflick and Sean Woodhouse really put on a fantastic event. We were also again fortunate enough to have a chance to contribute to the conference (Paris spoke at the first ever Swipe Conference, in Melbourne last year), with Jon presenting Cocos2D for Fun and Profit, a quick guide to the Cocos2D graphics library. Designed as a fast introduction to this time-saving library, this talk leads the audience from a minimal starting point to a full game.
We're incredibly fond of Cocos2D, as it provides a very nice middle option for people who want more power than what UIKit can provide, but don't want to deal with the.. joy that is OpenGL. With Cocos2D, it's straightforward to create a scene comprising a number of quads, and even more trivial to animate these quads in useful ways.
We've uploaded the code and slides to GitHub and Speakerdeck, and encourage you to take a look! We had a number of people approach us after the talk and mention that they were now interested in making games with this library, so hooray, we're sharing the love!
We also took a lot of photos at Swipe Conference –– you can find them on Flickr.