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.
Bug
Order of Operations in Components
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.
Hit Testing and Event Propogation in SpriteKit
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.
External Libraries with the SpriteKit Visual Editor
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.