Over the weekend, the Secret Lab team participated in GovHack 2013. Together with our friends and colleagues we formed a team and hacked a project together, using government data, over the 48 hour event.

The GovHack team included Secret Lab’s Jon and Paris, as well as frequent collaborators and friends Tim “McJones” Nugent, Nic “Winton” Wittison, Josh Deprez, Matthew D’Orazio, and Rex Smeal, as well our friends Frank Sainsbury, Sebastian Cook, and Eloise “Ducky” Macdonald-Meyer. Together, the team built a digital card game called Marvellous Ultimate Appliance, based around Energy Australia’s appliance efficiency and power consumption data.

The game was designed to help raise awareness of the energy usage and efficiencies of common household appliances. We had an absolute blast making it, and can’t wait for next year’s GovHack!

You can learn more about our 2-day game, Marvellous Ultimate Appliance, at http://admiraldolphin.github.io. The game was built in Unity, and runs on the web, Mac, Windows, and Linux. We plan to expand on it, with the team, in the near future. Thank you to the Hobart venue, The Typewriter Factory, and the organisers in Hobart, particularly Richard Tubb and Casey Farrell. The food was brilliant, the venue was brilliant, and the constant coffee was exceptional!

Special congratulations to our team member, Frank Sainsbury, who won the Spirit of GovHack award for Tasmania. Likewise, thank you to Pia Waugh for organising the event nationally.

You can watch our team's video below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLppE0mx5DE&w=500] You can view all of our photos from GovHack 2013 in Tasmania on Flickr. Don't forget to check out our project, as well as all the other brilliant projects on the GovHack Hackerspace.

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.