Update: I would say this method is still valid if you want to use single assets across all devices, but I am now using points and asset catalogs (even though it’s a lot of extra work).
I honestly thought I had it figured out.
I hadn’t.
I mean, I had. Except it’s always more complicated than that.
Let’s talk about scene sizes.
(Again.)
As in, I used a sketching pencil, not that he himself is sketchy.
Although, he might be. I personally wouldn’t trust that soul patch.
The default way of working with SpriteKit is to have the SKScene instance capture all the inputs and then have logic within that scene file to figure out the user’s intention.
In order for this to work, SKNode instances added to this scene have their isUserInteractionEnabled property set to false by default. This property prevents these nodes from capturing input and are effectively invisible to the event chain.
I have been keeping a daily practice of writing at least 200 words a day towards a writing project (blog post, newsletter, speech, game dialogue, etc.) for over 900 days now.
Over that time I have developed a few vague rules—word counts are allowed to roll over but only for a maximum of two days (e.g. if I write 1,000 words, then I can have the next two days off); I can retroactively complete a day but it has to be the day following the one I missed—but the core spirit of it has remained the same and I have maintained it come what may.
Sometimes, of course, those words just won’t come.
Finally finished this test game intro comic thing. It is now complete and I can get on with some real work.
One of the advantages of blogging about my work is that it makes me think carefully about what I’m doing. After finishing my post on my instruction system, I started reading more about closures which led me to reconsider some of the decisions I’d made.
I have been working on a library of basic components that is designed to work for many different types of game. It abstracts away platform-specific inputs, converting them into platform-agnostic interactions.
Taking this a step further, I have expanded this into an instruction system that takes advantage of Swift’s features to create an Instruction struct. This struct uses pseudo-English formatting that makes adding actions to entities simple and easy to read:
Dave Rapoza had a dream about hobgoblins fixing hatred in Twitter and called it the Hobgoblin Movement of Peace and Twitter responded by drawing a ton of hobgoblins.
The docs for SKNode say that the hit test order is the reverse of the render order (i.e. hit testing works from the topmost node down), but this isn’t strictly true.
It implies that if you have two nodes overlapping and the top one is not participating in hit testing, then the next one down will get the event. Unfortunately, this isn’t what happens.
Another panel from my intro animation to a mini-game that’s just there to test a development component library and so doesn’t need a title screen let alone an introductory comic animation.
