Wednesday, February 19, 2014

HowTo: Add View Controllers to the game storyboard and use segues to navigate between them

Welcome to Part 2 of my blog series about game development.


Today I'm creating the basic game infrastructure, not the game itself. If you haven't completed part 1, you can download the project from GitHub (version v0.1).


Basic screens needed for the game:



  • Start Screen: Main menue 
  • About Screen: Information about the developer of the game, website, ...
  • Settings Screen: Choose settings like Sound on/off, ...
  • Play Screen: The Game
  • AddHighScoreScreen: Add a new highscore entry
  • Highscore: List of the highscores 

Monday, February 10, 2014

HowTo: Design for depth - Creating a start screen with parallax animations using iOS 7 motion effects


One highly noticed innovation in iOS 7 was the parallax effect on the home screen. When you tilt your device this gives you the impression of depth.

Luckily it is incredible easy to implement this behaviour with the iOS 7 motion effects.

First you need a background which is larger than the screen and some foreground elements like Buttons, Labels, ...:



Thursday, February 6, 2014

Kick Off - Creating a Jump & Run game for iOS Devices


I love developing small games and did this on multiple platforms ...

... but no one has ever been really finished. The reasons have been every time the same: Not good enough, I didn't know how to distribute, no time to continue, ...

After buying my first iPhone and Mac I decided to learn Objective C. In my opinion the best way to learn new things is having fun. So I started writing a small game prototype. Without experience in Objective C and at the beginning not knowing where to go, I ended up with a running prototype and a lot of spaghetti code.
Now having a clear goal and a lot more experience on the iOS platform I decided to do a complete redesign.

To motivate me additionally I'll share the progress and my learnings in this blog.

Please be patient with me, if I need some time to post new updates. Being a father of two little girls means I have not more than one or two hours in the evening to work on this game (of course not every evening).

Let's see if I can finish it this time ;-)
Have fun!

Stefan


Planned Topics:

  • Create the skeleton app: Views, Storyboards, UIView Animations
  • View Controller Navigation
  • HighScore
    • TableView
    • Picture Capturing
  • Import tmc level files from Tiled
  • Use URL Schemes to import tmc files send per email
  • SpriteKit
    • Physics
    • Animation
    • Handling collisions
    • Use CoreMotion
    • ...
  • Use Apple TV to play on a big screen
  • Game Center integration
  • iAd integration