Category: Games
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Using Haptics
Learn how to use haptics to give phone vibrations and physical sensation to your iPhone apps.
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The Slippy Flippy Challenge: Make Marquee Style Scrolling Backgrounds
To give a sense of motion in a game one can use parallax backgrounds. Such backgrounds are in constant motion, but at a different rate than the foreground motion. In Slippy Flippy, we use ice floating by on the water for such an effect. While this seems rather complicated, it is not as difficult as […]
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The Slippy Flippy Challenge: Make Active Boundaries in Sprite Kit.
In Flappy Bird, hitting the top or bottom boundaries ends the game. They also convey a sense of motion. The boundaries make for a better playing experience. Last time, we set up collision detection, but we need boundaries that are sprites. Sprite node boundaries would be able to tell us what we hit, and run […]
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Living Without Storyboards: Make a Clock with Sprite Kit
Sprite Kit — it’s not just for games anymore. Sprite Kit is of course meant to write games, a full 2-d game engine waiting for use inside Xcode and iOS7. While simulating buttons writing SlippyFlippyPenguin, I began to realize there’s a lot more here that could be applied to a general UI. I’ve often tried […]
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The SlippyFlippy Challenge: Working With Sprite Kit Collision Detection
In our last installment, we ran into a problem trying to get collisions to work correctly with the obstacle. We want it to interact with the penguin, but not the game world. If we turn on physics, either the edgeLoop on the scene blocks the obstacle from entering the scene by , or causes very jittery […]
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The SlippyFlippy Challenge: Make a Better Obstacle in Sprite Kit
Build a Better Obstacle In the SlippyFlippy challenge we have a small obstacle. In Flappy Bird there are two obstacles which the bird has to pass between. Let’s change our current obstacle into a pass-through obstacle like Flappy Bird. Make a Random Obstacle Our current obstacle is a bit boring. It always shows up […]
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SlipppyFlippyPenguin1.1 Now in the App Store.
SlippyFlippy has gone through an update and is now better. Besides fixing The Hard Mode Bug as described in The Bug Hunt, Slippy has new features for keeping score of Hard and Easy Modes separately, and a countdown timer so you are ready to start the game. If you haven’t tried it yet, try this […]
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SlippyFlippy 1.1: The Bug Hunt
Since my last post I got my first one-star review of SlippyFlippyPenguin. The Hard Mode bug did it. Someone else can’t start the game in hard mode. In my last entry, I set up a timer to fix what I thought is a user-related problem with the game. In the process, I found the real bug. […]
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SlippyFlippy 1.1: How to make a Countdown Timer in Sprite Kit.
The next item on the update project list is making a countdown timer. For those who haven’t read earlier episodes of this blog, there is a bug I cannot find. For a very small number of users, the game ends immediately when starting in hard mode. This might just be a user problem not moving […]
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SlippyFlippy 1.1: Adding a Fading-in and out Label with Background in SpriteKit
Today we have a bug to deal with in SlippyFlippyPenguin. There are a two reports of when a user selects the hard skill level the game immediately goes to game over. I cannot find anything that is different in the code to account for this except user error. I think the user error is users […]
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