Handling Swipe Gestures in a SpriteKit Game

February 16th, 2018

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When you create a SpriteKit Xcode project, the GameScene.swift file contains functions to handle touch and/or mouse events, depending on the type of SpriteKit project you create. You can also use swipe gestures in SpriteKit games. Supporting swipe gestures requires you to perform two tasks. The first task is to create a swipe gesture recognizer. […]


Frequently Asked Questions on Making Your First Game

January 26th, 2018

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I was recently doing some research on people new to game development for a possible project. A few questions cropped up repeatedly so I decided to answer them here. What Engine or Library Should I use? People new to game development often ask what game engine or library to use. There are a lot of […]


Keep Part of a SpriteKit Scene from Scrolling

August 8th, 2016

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I covered the basics of scrolling a SpriteKit scene with a camera node in my Scrolling a SpriteKit Scene with SKCameraNode article. But I didn’t cover one thing many games need. Many games use part of the screen to display vital information to the player such as score and health. When you scroll the game […]


Accessing a SpriteKit Scene’s View Controller

July 11th, 2016

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If you’re using Game Center in a SpriteKit game, you present Game Center view controllers to show things like leaderboards and achievements. To present a Game Center view controller, you need to access the SpriteKit scene’s view controller. The good news is accessing the scene’s view controller takes only one line of code. Adding the […]


Authenticating Game Center’s Local Player in a SpriteKit Game in Swift

June 6th, 2016

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Authenticating the local player for Game Center in a SpriteKit game requires two steps. The first step is to call the GKLocalPlayer class method localPlayer, which gives you access to Game Center’s local player. The second step is to supply a closure for the local player’s authenticateHandler property. This closure takes two arguments: a view […]


Saving Game Data with NSCoding in Swift

March 23rd, 2016

Filed under: Game Development, iOS Development, Mac Development | 11 comments

I reached a point in developing LetterMiner where I wanted to save the game when the player quit so they could pick up where they left off. I didn’t find a lot of information online on saving data in SpriteKit games so I’ve decided to share what I’ve learned. I hope it helps other people. […]


Scrolling a SpriteKit Scene with SKCameraNode

December 9th, 2015

Filed under: Game Development, iOS Development, Mac Development | 11 comments

Apple added the SKCameraNode class to SpriteKit in iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 to make it easier to scroll and zoom in SpriteKit scenes. This article shows what I’ve learned about scrolling SpriteKit scenes. This article assumes you have created a SpriteKit Xcode project and a scene for the project. This article focuses on […]


Creating a Windows Installer with Inno Setup

July 17th, 2012

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If you’re making a Windows game, one of the tasks you must perform is to create an installer for the game. Coming from Mac OS X, where installers are rarely used, I was a little worried about making an installer for the Windows version of Letter Miner. But after doing some Internet research, I came […]


Using Tries to Store Word Lists in RAM

July 10th, 2012

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One task every word game must perform is determining whether or not the word the player creates is a valid word. To check if a word is a valid, the game needs a word list and check if the word the player creates is in the list. How do you store the word list so […]


Creating a Custom Orthographic Projection With Pyglet

February 21st, 2012

Filed under: Game Development, OpenGL | Be the first to comment!

When you create a pyglet window, pyglet sets up an OpenGL orthographic projection for the window. The size of the projection matches the size of the window. If the window is 640 pixels wide and 480 pixels wide, the orthographic projection is 640 units wide and 480 units high. Pyglet’s default behavior works well in […]