As I’ve been working with Entity Component Systems in SpriteKit, I’ve come to realise that Apple’s implementation of the pattern is subtly different to what I understand is the ‘pure’ form of this pattern.
Movement
Handling Movement Part 2: Scaling and Z-Positions
In part one, I set up a Movement Component that moved sprites around a space without any regard for the type of scene that they inhabit.
However, many adventure game scenes have some sort of perspective where it’s possible for players to move around an object.
Imagine a game where, say, a character in a trench coat is visiting a square in Lecce, Italy. For some reason, there’s a crate in the middle of it:
Handling Movement Part 1: Getting from A to B
In my initial prototype I used SKActions exclusively to handle movement. It’s a fire and forget solution—I create an action with a destination point and a duration and run that action on a sprite. SpriteKit will move that sprite to the given point over the given time without me having to think about it again.
let moveAction = SKAction.moveTo(x: hasTarget, duration: length / moveSpeedInPointsPerSecond) sprite.run(moveAction)
It’s great for many situations. However, there are a few limitations: