
Jon Manning
iOS Development Trainer & Writer, author of numerous iOS books”
Jon Manning is a co-founder of Secret Lab, where he makes games and does research. He has an actual PhD about jerks on the internet, has written about a dozen technical books for O’Reilly Media, and wrote two games for ABC’s Play School and one for Qantas. He’s currently working on Button Squid, a top-down puzzler for iOS, and is fond of making cool tools for rad devs.
You can find her at home in Auckland, New Zealand with her husband and daughter.
Books
The Kerbal Player’s Guide: The Easiest Way to Launch a Space Program
Mobile Game Development with Unity: Build Once, Deploy Anywhere
Learning Swift: Building Apps for OS X and iOS
iOS Swift Game Development Cookbook: Simple Solutions for Game Development Problems
Swift Development with Cocoa: Developing for the Mac and iOS App Stores
iPhone and iPad Game Development For Dummies
Learning Cocoa with Objective-C: Developing for the Mac and iOS App Stores
Recent Articles
NBN helps Secret Lab’s apps see the light of day
Paris Buttfield-Addison & Jon Manning win Tasmanian Pearcey Award
9 41 9 42: The secret of Apple’s recurring numbers
Videos
YOW! Connected 2015 Patrick Buttfield-Addison & Jon Manning – Watch This Face
YOW! Connected 2015 – Jon Manning & Paris Buttfield-Addison – How Do I Game Design?
Build a Game in Less Than an Hour with Unity
YOW! 2016 Brisbane
How Do I Game Design? Design Games, Understand People!
TALK – VIEW SLIDES
In this session, you’ll learn about game design: the art and science of constructing enjoyable, engaging games. We aren’t doing any coding, and we’re not talking game engine development – instead, we’ll be taking a deep dive into game design theory, using it to understand how people interact with rules, and how to use it to improve your community, your company, your project, and your software.
Video games are the most glamorous of the electronic arts, but splashy graphics and amazing sound aren’t the defining feature of games. Games are the world’s only interactive artistic medium, and good interaction needs to be designed. Today’s master crafters of interaction design are game designers.
In this session, you’ll get a fresh perspective on user experience design and community engagement by understanding how people are interacting with the fastest-growing form of entertainment in the world.
Topics covered in this session include:
- Why games work, and how to analyse and build engaging experiences
- The Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics framework: what it’s good for, and how to use it
- How to understand what a game’s doing, and how to build for fun
We’ll take this knowledge and apply it to real world examples in the realms of UX and UI design, community management, project management, and company building, as well as a few examples from the actual game development industry.
KEYWORDS
Design, Games, Rules, Interaction, UX