Simon's Sanitarium

Simon's Sanitarium

Documenting the long, hard road to releasing an adventure game

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Game Development

Update on my Generic Node Component

Simon • nev-clockAugust 22, 2019

Last year I wrote about my Generic Node Component which I use as the basis for displaying nodes in an ECS-based game. Since then, I’ve refined this approach in a couple of ways.

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AVAudioPlayer Causing Frame Rate Drops in SpriteKit

Simon • nev-clockAugust 15, 2019

It started with a trip to Singapore.

This was a natural deadline to get AdventureKit to 1.0.

It was going so well. In the last week, I had added my first animated walk cycle and even included some reach animations for my main character.

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Order of Operations in Components

Simon • nev-clockAugust 8, 2019

I have a trigger component that can cause things to happen in my games as a response to other events. Each trigger has various properties (animation, sound, movement) that the trigger component uses to update other components.

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An illustration of a character with a goatee and a trench coat standing in an Italian square

Improving my Animation Abilities

Simon • nev-clockAugust 1, 2019

Levelling Up My Skills

After creating the ultimate guide to animation tools on the mac, I have settled on using After Effects with Duik Bassel to do my animating.

Unfortunately, learning how to use the tools is the easy bit.

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Drafting a Puzzle Document: Drawing the Room Layout and Puzzle Structure

Simon • nev-clockJune 27, 2019

I’m using Scrivener to draft the puzzle document for my first adventure game and I’m using Grim Fandango’s document as a template.

Initially, I created the room layout in Affinity Designer on the iPad and exported it as an image which was then embedded into a Scrivener document.

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Managing State in Adventure Games

Simon • nev-clockJune 21, 2019

One of the things that I got stuck on last year while developing AdventureKit was tracking state. After coming back to it again this year I realise I was coming at it from the wrong direction.

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Screenshot showing two finder windows. On the left are two image files showing the before state, on the right 12 files showing the after state.

Automator App for Creating Xcode Assets

Simon • nev-clockJune 13, 2019

As I start animating, I’ll be using apps like After Effects and Adobe Animate that don’t have the same kind of asset generation abilities of apps like Photoshop and Sketch.

These animation apps do have the ability to export the animation as a sequence of PNG files and it is possible with these apps to export the files at the different sizes required for Xcode.

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Halving and Doubling protocol

Simon • nev-clockMay 16, 2019

In one of my many previous posts on screen sizes I mentioned that I have decided to use points and asset catalogs with scaled assets for AdventureKit.

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Creating Xcode-ready Assets on iOS

Simon • nev-clockMay 9, 2019

Now that I’ve resigned myself to creating assets for all the different devices, I am looking for ways to automate this process as much as possible.

Photoshop has a number of different asset generation options, so that’s easy enough.

However, I do a lot of drawings and design on my iPad using apps like Procreate and Affinity Designer.

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A screenshot of AdventureKit Answers after the questionnaire is complete. There are three devices: the iPad, the iPhone 8, and the iPhone XS, all showing different amounts of a background scene. At the bottom is a code sample with some code to set up the scene, and to the right of that detailed instructions on the trade-offs for the choices made for this game.

AdventureKit Answers

Simon • nev-clockMay 2, 2019

TL; DR: I made a Mac app that asks you a bunch of questions about your game and then tells you how to set up your SpriteKit scene and asset documents.

It’s called AdventureKit Answers and you can download it here.

I have written many, many, many posts about this topic.

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