ButtonNode with enable

This is a follow-up to my previous ButtonNode post.  In this update I will be adding additional functionality to the button to allow the button to be enabled and disabled. For this new functionality I want the ButtonNode to be able to do the following: Maintain a boolean value indicating the current state of the […]

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2015 Holiday Game Jam

What better gift can one receive than the experience and exhaustion that comes from a Game Jam. As if the holidays weren’t stressful enough with family, old friends, traditions, travel, of of course that last min party preparation. With less than 3 days to jam out a game before christmas eve, despite the warm weather […]

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Preroll Video iAd’s as Reward Incentive

A common Freemium model for mobile games is to offer a reward (currency, bonuses, etc) in exchange for watching a fullscreen video ad. Attempting to recreate this model using video preroll iAds is possible but has some less than ideal complications. I’ll be going over the basic implementation and the things I wish were different. […]

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ButtonNode

When we first started developing with SpritKit we quickly felt the need for some higher level abstractions.  One example of this is a button.  As a result we ended up creating a simple ButtonNode class that we could use throughout our game.  This post will present an example of our button node extracted from our Fillip’s […]

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SpriteKit and iOS9

This is a short post discussing a few issues that we encountered with updating our SpritKit based game, Fillips Feast, to work with iOS 9. For the most part everything just worked when running Fillip’s Feast on iOS 9.  But, we did encounter a few issues. One of the first things we noticed was that our […]

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fillip feast health dashboard

Game Health Indicator

This post is going to present a simple solution for building a dynamic health indicator for your game.  This is based on the health indicator we included in our Fillip’s Feast game, available in the Apple App Store. The following are the features we wanted for our health meter. Follow the overall look of the […]

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Web Inspector for iOS Development

If you have done any web related development you are probably aware of the Web Inspector that is available in Safari on your desktop system.  If not, here is how to enable this feature. First you need to enable development mode in Safari.  To do this go to Preferences and select the Advanced Tab.  At […]

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Working with Images in SpriteKit – Texture Atlas

By: Mark Johnson @mellowcoder  What is a Texture Atlas A Texture Atlas is simply a large image file that is created by combining together multiple individual images.  This can save memory and allows iOS to more efficiently render the textures in your application.  The nice thing about SpriteKit is that Apple takes care of building the […]

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Working with Images in SpriteKit – Image Sets

By: Mark Johnson @mellowcoder Asset Catalog – Image Sets This is the second in a series of posts on working with images in SpriteKit.  In this post we will look at using Images Sets.  Asset Catalogs and Image Sets were introduced in Xcocde 5.  If you start a new app in Xcode 5 the App Icon […]

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Working with Images in SpriteKit – Image Files

By: Mark Johnson @mellowcoder The following is the first in a series of posts on working with images in SpriteKit. Specifically how to manage image files when developing a Universal App.  This first post will be a general discussion of image sizes and look at the naming conventions that can be used when adding images directly […]

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