A screenshot of the SpriteKit visual editor in Xcode. Highlighted in the top right are the components with editable GKInspectable properties that have been applied to a node within the visual editor.

External Libraries with the SpriteKit Visual Editor

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I’m in the process of developing a library of useful, reusable components that could be dropped as an external library into a SpriteKit project.

They include things like my NodeComponent and an abstracted way of managing three different kinds of input from either macOS or iOS (single tap/left click, double tap/right click, and pan/mouse drag). It also has a physics component and a render component—things that come up in games of all different types.

The components often have a lot of editable properties that affect how entities behave in the game. Tagging these properties with the @GKInspectable tag allows you to use these components within the SpriteKit visual editor.

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My Instagram Top 9 of 2018. 9 small square boxes featuring, from top left, a set of 6 concept drawings of a spooky bathroom, my character in a trench coat in Lecce main square, my black and white despair man sitting with his head between his knees, my trench coat dude lounging on an Italian balcony, my in a trench coat in another Lecce square, Big Al from the Country Bear Jamboree, illustration of the Barley Mow in Brighton, me being hunted by an alien, and the honesty bar at Masseria Il Frantoio in Puglia.

Simon’s Instagram Top 9

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These are my Top 9 posts from Instagram this year. A nice mix of stuff from my location studies (2, 4, 5, 7, 9), some concept work for my adventure game (1), and the results of my first art stream on Twitch (8).

Erin had been trying to convince me to do more illustrations of the places we travel to for years because she thought folks would like them. This year I finally started doing some and already they make up the majority of my top 9.

Turns out she was right.

(Again.)

Procreate showing a square image with a range of 7 different fonts. They all read twitch.tv/simonfairbairn, and all have different effects. The top is a gold gradient, the second is black but fades away to nothing at the bottom, the third has a reddish gradient along the top, the fourth has a thick drop shadow, the fifth has been warped to give a fisheye effect, the sixth is coloured purple, and the seventh is coloured blue.
Screenshot of the Build Settings for both the macOS and iOS targets, with the Product Module Name set to BasicComponents_Example