We have two brand new books on game development available right now! We’re super excited! Check them out?

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.

Our new Unity book is available, in rough early release form. Buy it now and get all the updates! It's also on sale (code: CYBER15) for Cyber Monday (whatever that is...) The details are over on Paris' blog. 

These webcasts have both happened already! We'll be posting the content here within 24-48 hours! Thanks for watching!

We're doing two webcasts with O'Reilly Media in the coming week. They're both free and the content we cover is a lot of fun. They are:

• Five Swift Essentials – covering five core components in your programming arsenal when building software for iOS or OS X with Swift, Apple's new language.
• Build a Game in Less Than an Hour with Unity – covering everything you need to build a simple asteroid shooting game with Unity, the amazingly powerful game engine.

Both webcasts are free, and you can register for them via the links above. We'd love to see you there! 

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.