We've spent the last week at O'Reilly Media's fantastic OSCON conference, in Portland, Oregon. We presented a whole bunch of talks, ranging from Swift programming to Kerbal Space Program. Friends of ours, and other interesting people, also presented great stuff. Our talks were:

• Programming with Swift – Github Repository (presented by us, together with Tim Nugent)
• Cross-device, cross-platform: Designing for the entire mobile universe (Mobile Design Tutorial) – Wireframes, and Slides (presented by Paris, together with Christopher Neugebauer)
• How Do I Game Design? – Slides (presented by us, together with Tim Nugent)
• The Mün and Back: A Kerbal Tale – Slides (presented by us, together with Tim Nugent, Alasdair Allan, and Paul Fenwick)

And great talks by our friends, and other interesting people, included:

• Rolling dice alone: Board games with remote friends – Slides (presented by Tim Nugent)
• High adventures in sniffing my own metadata – Slides (presented by Josh Deprez)
• Test-driven Repair – Slides (presented by Christopher Neugebauer)
• Internet archive: Universal access. Open APIs (presented by VM Brasseur and Alexis Rossi)
• The Future is Awesome (presented by Paul Fenwick)
• Situation Normal, Everything Must Change (presented by Simon Wardley)

We also did a book signing (or two), which was as strange-but-awesome experience as ever. We're looking forward to OSCON in Amsterdam! Our photos from OSCON 2015 in Portland are on Flickr.

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 Resistance
• The Resistance: Avalon
• Half-Life 2
• Portal 2
• Gone Home
• The Stanley Parable

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're very pleased to be presenting at O'Reilly's OSCON conference in Portland once again this year. We're involved in two tutorials this time around! For the first time at OSCON, Jon Manning and Paris Buttfield-Addison will be presenting a half-day tutorial on game design where they'll discuss what makes games fun, how they work, and how you can apply game design techniques to your daily non-game related work. This tutorial is hands-on, very practical, lots of fun, and is called How Do I Game Design?

For the third year in a row Chris Neugebauer, along with Jon and Paris, will be presenting a half-day tutorial on mobile application development with a focus on user-experience. As with the last two years, we'll be using Android as the platform we discuss the most – but everything will be applicable to all mobile platforms. The tutorial is called Level Up Your Apps: Mobile UX Design and Development.

We hope to see you at OSCON!

At OSCON this year, @chrisjrn, @desplesda and I presented a 3-hour tutorial on "Android-Fu: Awesome Apps for Ice Cream Sandwich and Beyond". We had a great turn out, and it was a lot of fun to present at OSCON for the second year in a row (last year we presented the well received Android for people who hate phones, a similar topic in a similar style).

You can also find the code from the activity on GitHub, as well as the final binary (APK) for installation on your Android 4.0+ device.

We hope you enjoyed it! Please get in touch if you have any questions or feedback!