Jon and I will be speaking at the awesome new conference (& expo), APPCON in Las Vegas in August. If you’re interested in mobile app development, on any platform, you need to be there!

App development conferences are a dime a dozen, but all of them are narrowly focused on one platform or another. Even the big must-attend conferences run by the overseers and owners of each platform (such as Google’s I/O, Apple’s WWDC, and RIM’s BlackBerry DevCon) are, by virtue of their provenance, limited to a single platform.

That’s why we’re really excited to both be speaking, along with our fantastic co-author Neal Goldstein, and the Product Evangelist of our favourite game development tool, Tom Higgins of Unity Technologies, at APPCON in Las Vegas – their holistic approach to covering mobile apps is a breath of a fresh air. It’s definitely a conference anyone who is serious about this industry needs to be at – even if you only develop for one of the big mobile platforms, you’re not doing yourself justice unless you’re also keeping up with the others!

Hope to see you there! Let us know if you’re there, we’d love to see the interesting things that you’re working on, or show you what we’re up to!

Paris Buttfield-Addison
Production Lead

It’s time for another update on our very-near-future training and workshops! Jon Manning and I, the Secret Lab founders, will be the instructors for all these workshops.

ACS Tasmania iPhone and iPad App Development Workshop
10th, 11th and 12th May 2010, in central Hobart (Tasmania, Australia)
Three days of learning how to make awesome iPhone apps.
Open to the public! Sign up here!

AUC Unity Game Development Workshop – Melbourne
18th, 19th and 20th May 2010, in central Melbourne (Victoria, Australia)
Three days of learning how to make incredible games for PC, Mac, web, iPhone, iPad, Android and consoles!

iPhone Boot Camp Melbourne
21st, 22nd and 23rd May 2010, in central Melbourne (Victoria, Australia)
Three days of learning how to make awesome iPhone apps.
Open to the public! Sign up here!
(Sending a group from your organisation? Contact us for potential discount rates!)

AUC Unity Game Development Workshop – Brisbane
18th, 19th and 20th May 2010, in central Brisbane (Queensland, Australia)
Three days of learning how to make incredible games for PC, Mac, web, iPhone, iPad, Android and consoles!

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us (details on the sidebar) if you want more information about our training offerings.

Paris Buttfield-Addison
Production Lead

We got to San Francisco from Palo Alto via an exciting train journey, where we found that this weeks issue of SF Weekly has an interesting tagline about an interesting sounding article on San Francisco. After that, we had some steak and relaxed; we went to the movies to see both “Cop Out” (awesome, but completely stupid) and “Alice in Wonderland” (typical Tim Burton genius). At the cinema, we were fortunate enough to see the Old Spice “I’m on a horse” ad on the big screen – which would more than made up the price of admission, even if the movie had been rubbish!

Soon enough we registered for GDC and checked in to our glorious hotel rooms. We’re staying at the San Francisco Marriott on 4th, and it really is quite high. After attempting to pose the Secret Lab business cards against the view and miserably failing to show off both the awesomeness of the view or the majesty of the business cards we gave up and got more food, this time far too much pasta (some of which is still sitting in our hotel room fridge!) We went for a wander to Union Square, and wandered around Borders for far too long – and, as usual even though we both use Sony eReaders, came away with more books.

The next day, GDC started! After being welcomed by a threatening Wario banner we proceeded down the grand (ahem) staircase of Moscone North before figuring out that we actually needed to be in Moscone South – after a swift adventure through a maze of tunnels, we found ourselves underneath Moscone South. We planned to attend the 10th Annual Game Design Workshop after having heard so many good things about it.

A host of amusing personalities, led by the seemingly inimitable Marc LeBlanc begun leading us through, and lecturing us on, a variety of fascinating topics on game design. The first thing we did was create a new set of rules, and a new setting, for the game SISSYFIGHT 3000. Paris’ team came up with “Constructing Thermonuclear Robot Wars” in which we used the papercraft Wario that Nintendo gave us as parts to represent building a robot. It got far, far more complex from there.

After some vigorous playtesting, brainstorming and laughing the activity changed, and we started to brainstorm “Epic Performance” moments of a game, with an eye to improving the “epicness” when a player fails. It was fun, but I’m still not entirely sure what we came up with! Following that, we moved to inserting a rule for player behaviour into a game called “100 Zombies”. Let me tell you, trying to figure out how a character labelled “Math Whiz” moves and fights zombies is no small challenge. So far, we’ve come up with a system whereby he “triangulates” the position of zombies, throws set squares and kills the zombies on the tip of a 3-4-5 triangle. I’ll post a diagram when I get a moment. We also, of course, collected our free phones from Google!

After that, we went to Unitys iPhone Networking Reception, and met up with the ever-friendly Tom Higgins from Unity and a whole host of other awesome Unity users and iPhone developers. From there, we set off to Chieftan’s Irish Pub (at the recommendation of Tom) and grabbed some dinner (including Bangers & Mash and Irish Stew!) with a small group of developers, artists and sound designers. It was great to meet so many awesome people in one day!

So, today (Day 2) we’re going back to the Game Design Workshop to continue work on “100 Zombies” and other exciting things! Tomorrow, the conference begins in earnest!

And now, since it’s 8:20 AM and the conference begins at 10AM, it’s time to go and have coffee! More photos are here.

For the next week (March 6th – March 14th) we’ll be in San Francisco attending GDC 2010, the world’s biggest game developer conference.

We’re really looking forward to the great talks in the GDC schedule, as well as meeting all sorts of interesting people! If you want to catch up with us or talk tech or games, let us know!

We’re almost 50% of the way through writing our book, iPhone and iPad Game Development for Dummies, with our talented and hard working co-author Neal Goldstein. It’s a very exciting book, and we’re really looking forward to it being released!

On the training front, May will be a busy month for us. We’re running two awesome Unity workshops of three days each in Melbourne and Brisbane, for the Apple University Consortium (if you’re an Australian University student enrolled at a University that belongs to the AUC, you can attend for almost nothing, learn more here!) They’re a brilliant way to bring up your skills in game development. We had a great group of students when we ran them in Sydney in December 2009.

In mid-May we’re also running an iPhone training workshop for the general public in Melbourne. This workshop, organised through the awesome iPhone Boot Camp will give you knowledge to start developing awesome apps and games of your own. Learn more about the workshop, or sign up here. Early-bird sales end March 15!

We’ve got some big exciting projects coming up in 2010, and we’re doing some mobile work with some truly awesome people in the San Francisco Bay Area. Stay tuned!

Oh yeah, and we’ve got awesome new business cards for GDC too:

Secret Lab Business Cards, for Important Business

Hope to see you all at GDC!

While the shave occurred, the open source game competition was in its final hours, so once there were photos online our very own Andrew Bennett had until his laptop battery ran out to produce a game worthy of the devil. With only half an hour to spare, we managed to produce a quick and dirty flash game, that while rough around the edges managed to get some great publicity for Secret Lab and hopefully the Tasmanian Devil as well.

Here are some well known sites that link to it:

http://www.gag.com/bdale/blog/posts/Facial_Dignity.html

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/22853/1090/

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090126/

Culture is available for purchase via the iTunes App Store, and costs less than a coffee at our office*. Enjoy!

Update: Culture is now available for FREE!

* Starbucks has such comfortable seating..