HowTo: Use the Device Motion Sensors to control your game

Welcome to Part 6 of my blog series about game development.

Today I'll include motion detection to control the movement of my game. iOS offers a powerful API to handle motion detection with the CMMotionManager class.

Let's start with a small standalone project to show how to use the motion detection:

HowTo: Implement endless scrolling with parallax effects

Welcome to Part 5 of my blog series about game development.

Today I'll create a component which implements the endless scrolling and adds some parallax effects. I'll use SpriteKit for that. A nice tutorial about SpriteKit can be found here and here and here.

If you haven't completed part 3 or 4, you can download the project from GitHub: v0.3

First of all we need some background images to show the infinite parallax scrolling. I've created four layers:

Background:

HowTo: Implement endless scrolling

Welcome to Part 4 of my blog series about game development.

Today I'm showing how to implement an endless scrolling which is typical for Jump & Run games. 

First of all you need a background with 3 sections like the one shown below:

Section 1 and 3 must be identical and have to fit on the whole screen. 

HowTo: Add Splash Screen & Application Icons

Welcome to Part 3 of my blog series about game development.

Today I'm adding the app icons and a splash screen. I'll use an asset catalog for that. If you haven't completed part 2, you can download the project from GitHub: v0.2.1

First of all let's hide the annoying header bar:

You have to add to entries in the plist file: "Supporting Files/MyFirstGame-Info.plist"

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 

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, ...:

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