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.
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.
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.
As my workday leans more towards asset generation rather than straight coding, I’ve started looking at different tools available for creating and animating characters.
The art style I’m aiming for in my games is cartoony but won’t be pixel art so, while there are many great (and often free or low-cost) pixel art animation tools, I won’t be discussing them here.
As always, this is full of spoilers!
I think about this game a lot.
I think about how it starts with a woman trying to talk calmly to a man who has tied her up and is threatening to kill her just because she had the temerity to say no and how that’s even more relevant and relatable 26 years later.
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.
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.
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.
A couple of weeks is all it took for me to revisit this.
It seems that Apple read my previous post about using iPad-sized assets across all devices and said to themselves “Best put a stop to that nonsense.”
I have a Direction enum that I use to position UI layers in my adventure game. It supports 8 compass directions plus a case for centre:
public enum Direction : String, CaseIterable, Codable {
case center, north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest
}