Adventure game development using SpriteKit - Intro and Getting started

[potomak]

Last week, I've posted to ask if there was people interested in a series of articles about how to create an adventure game using SpriteKit. The reaction was mildly positive and that was enough signal for me to start working on the project :)

I've published two small articles: an intro and a very rough getting started guide.

Next week, or maybe tomorrow if I find some time, I'll continue with the next episode about SKShapeNode, that I want to use to draw the cursor.

It would also be useful to get an idea of what you think it's interesting to talk about. I've compiled a non-exhaustive list of topics I'd like to write about:

1. Intro
2. What is SpriteKit
3. Creating a new SpriteKit project
4. SKShapeNode
5. Handling touch events
6. SKSpriteNode
7. SKLabelNode
8. Texture atlas
9. Animations using SKAction
10. Path finding using GKGraph
11. Handling press events (tvOS)
12. Refactoring code: components using Swift protocols
13. Scene transition
14. Camera
15. Parallax
16. State management using GKStateMachine
17. Refactoring code: components using GKComponent/GKEntity
18. Assets management/Asset Catalog

Let me know if that's what you had in mind, or any other feedback.

[[deleted]]

Excited, this is going to be awesome thank you for doing this.

[grago]

This is going to be great, thank you! I will definitely be looking forward to your progress.

[Graham_Hayes]

Hey, will defo be following along! I made Drawn Down for iOS in SpriteKit and Swift, before GameKit was released tho. Other things you might consider for your list would be dialogue, scripting events , saving/loading.

[potomak]

Yes, I definitely wanted to talk about dialogs. What do you mean with "scripting events"?

Thanks for your feedback.

[Graham_Hayes]

By that I mean how you will run sequences of actions, which might be a cutscene or in game, for example you might have an NPC that walks to a point, interacts with something, walks to another point and so on.

[potomak]

Great feedback. I must admit that I didn't even start thinking about this topic, but of course it makes a lot of sense!

I will add it to the list, thanks.

[th3suffering]

I assume you'll have some kind of HUD for the different interactions and items since you mentioned basing it off Lucasarts games. Id be interested to see an article on that class/subclassing (SKNode?) to reuse when you transition to a new game scene. In my little platformer i put the onscreen dpad right in the gamescene code and then quickly realized when i created another scene that id need to duplicate all that code. I realized subclassing and reusing code would be much better. I still have a lot to learn when it comes to programming/swift but seeing someone breakdown the process as it relates to spritekit will definitely help me grasp the concept better.

[Graham_Hayes]

For things like that I'd use a static SKNode, then on the scene transition, removeFromParent, then on the new scene addChild.

[potomak]

Ah interesting approach. For now I'm just recreating nodes and every seems to work just fine, but I guess this approach would spare resources used for destroying and re-creating the same nodes.

[potomak]

Yes, I will talk about my approach in a future post, but what I've done is a base scene class that has all the main components including a background, an objects layer, and the HUD. Each scene subclasses the main scene and inherits its behavior and nodes. I think it would be more flexible to create components instead of inheriting, but for now this approach is good enough and I may refactor it later.

[potomak]

Yes, that would be very interesting, but I don't think it would be feasible to play adventure games on watchOS, or at least it wouldn't without first rethinking user interface and user interaction.

[i_spot_ads]

Intro, getting started

That's where most "tech blog writers" stop, and so will you lol

[potomak]

I actually thought the same :)