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.
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.
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 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!
First, books!
We're very pleased to announce that our latest two books are now available! The first, Learning Cocoa with Objective-C Fourth Edition, is an update to our previous third edition book, this time co-written with our frequent collaborator and co-conspirator Tim Nugent. It covers everything existing programmers need to skill up with the latest in iPhone, iPad, and Mac development technologies.
The second new book is the iOS Game Development Cookbook; it provides a huge range of recipes for common things you need to when building a game for iOS (or any other platform, if you're willing to translate the examples out of Cocoa and Objective-C, or even for things that aren't games if you're creative!)
We're really proud of both of these books, and hope you find them useful and enjoyable! Let us know what you think, or if you have any questions. You can find more details, and links to sample code, on our books page.
Second, training!
If you like our books, then why not try our training? Check out our previous blog post to learn more about our upcoming Melbourne iOS developer training.
Finally, conferences!
We're very pleased to be speaking at the (very awesome) O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) again this year – for the fourth time in a row! We'll be presenting our mobile app design workshop “Unfortunately, Design Tutorial Has Stopped”, and Other Ways to Infuriate People With Mobile Apps with frequent collaborator Chris Neugebauer, as well as the session How Do I Game Design?, exploring the basics of game design.
Additionally, Tim Nugent (our co-author on the latest Learning Cocoa book) will be presenting the session My Friends Keep Leaving and it is Ruining Board Games Day, which explores the state of augmented and remote board gaming; Chris Neugebauer is also presenting the session Portable Logic/Native UI exploring best practices for building mobile apps that need to run on multiple platforms. It's all sure to be excellent! Do try it.
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!