July 22, 2015

Using Swift GameplayKit to achieve rendering framework independence

July 22, 2015/ Swift Studies

In the last article we looked at providing a better (and purely Swift) implementation of GameplayKit's Entity/Component architecture. By better I didn't mean "it's Swift so it's better"... I meant better at solving the stated objectives of GameplayKit: Rendering framework independence and composition. I focused on composition last time, this time I look at how the Swift GameplayKit implementation (and Swift itself) makes rendering framework independence easy.

June 23, 2015

Demolition Page 3 - Adding State with GKStateMachine

June 23, 2015/ Swift Studies

We continue our exploration of Swift 2.0, GameplayKit, and SpriteKit by using GKStateMachine to make our game behave a little more like a real game without making our standard code more complex.

June 21, 2015

Demolition Page 2 - Extending our playground with GKGridGraph

June 21, 2015/ Swift Studies

We continue our playground exploration of GKGameplayKit, SpriteKit and Swift 2.0 by actually creating some player objects and helping them navigate their way around asking GKGridGraph's path finding abilities.

June 18, 2015

Demolition Page 1 - Making Levels

June 18, 2015/ Swift Studies

iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan strengthen Apple's gaming line up with GameplayKit, which augments the graphics (and physics) engines with a game engine. Over the coming weeks I'm going to walk through the process of developing a "bomber man" style game using SpriteKit and GameplayKit.

The code will be supplied in a playground that will have a page for each blog entry. In general, I'll discuss concepts in the blog, and leave explanations of specific pieces of code in comments or Playground markup. There's going to be a lot to cover, so let's get started.

June 16, 2015

GameplayKit... First Thoughts

June 16, 2015/ Swift Studies

I'm quite familiar with game engines, I've written a few in my time (I started on the Commodore 64, but didn't "get paid" until the Amiga. Look 'em up kids.). GameplayKit sounded very interesting so I was keen to get stuck in. After 24 hours, I've got some mixed feelings.

Swift Studies