SpriteKit

A completed illustrated puzzle with the words You Win! in the middle. These words are rendered smaller than on the film strip puzzle.
Pieces of a cut-up purple film strip are scattered across a dark grey background and randomly rotated
Pieces of a cut-up purple film strip are scattered across a dark grey background
An illustration of a piazza in Lecce, Italy, with a man in trench coat standing next to a box with a rabbit poking out of it. He is saying 'Are...are you seeing this?'

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:

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An illustration of two men, one in a trench coat and one in a purple suit, standing in an alley with a garage door in the background. The bottom sixth of the screen is highlighted red to illustrate where the man in the trench coat can move. This red space is marked 'Movement Space'.
An example scene with the movement area highlighted

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:

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