Category: Sprite Kit

• June 17, 2014

  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…
• May 30, 2014

  Living Without Story Boards: Using SKEmitter Nodes to Make the Fire Pendulum.

  In this last lesson in building the clock, I’ll introduce emitter nodes. I’ll turn our pendulum into a  ball of fire and make it snow in the app. Emitter nodes are special nodes that emit particles which follow their own physics. They cannot be assigned physics properties like collisions but make for many great special effects…
• May 22, 2014

  Living without Storyboards: Make a Working Stopwatch in Sprite Kit

  Over the last few posts we’ve made a clock and stopwatch application in Sprite Kit. Last time, we added an animated button display for the stopwatch. This time we get the stopwatch buttons working. Get Our Variables in Order We will use several variables in our changes. Change our variables to the following: We changed…
• May 13, 2014

  Make a Clock In Sprite Kit: Adding a Button for a Stopwatch

  In the clock app so far, we have a date and a time. We can switch between them by tapping the screen of our phone. Most apps use a button for this, and it’s time we added our first button. Our app will now change to a stopwatch mode when we press the button. Re-position…
• May 12, 2014

  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…
• May 9, 2014

  Make a Clock in Sprite Kit: Adding Animation to the Clock

  In our first installment, we added a label and set up a clock.  We could easily do that with a story board and a wired up label. The point of series this is to have a lot of cool animation running in Sprite Kit for a non game UI. We will begin to add animation…
• May 7, 2014

  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…
• May 5, 2014

  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…
• April 22, 2014

  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.…