TOKYO (MacHouse) – A few weeks ago, I released TileObject. It’s one of the two applications that I intended to develop before I put myself deep into SpriteKit game development. TileObject is a desktop application that lets you create a large platform map by combining graphical objects. There is another desktop application that I need – an application that lets me combine body parts to create different frames of a game character. It’s been actually complete and already submitted to Mac App Store, though. This new release is called Puppet Motion.

If you are a person like me who uses a vector-based application to create body parts to form a game character, naturally, you want to move some of them little by little, resizing some of them little by little, rotating them little by little to create different frames. Puppet Motion lets you do just that. It’s used to combine body parts of a sprite character so that you can create different frames by moving some of them little by little, resizing them little by little, rotating them little by little. After creating several frames, you can animate your sprite character with those frames. Finally, let the application save all frames as image files so that you can use them as SKTexture objects with SpriteKit through Xcode.   Continue reading →

TOKYO (MacHouse) – Nintendo‘s 1985 Super Mario Bros. is still a topic of the occasional talk among game developers. Maybe, it’s not terribly difficult to create a platform game like it if you use Apple’s Xcode and SpriteKit. Yet, those who know little about platform game development with me included, there are still many things to learn from this 30-year-old game.

One aspect of difficulty in developing a platform game with SpriteKit for iOS is that you have to deal with different interface sizes. You have iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and iPad. Naturally, you will learn to position sprite nodes relative to the center of the world. But that makes it difficult for one to figure out the position of another node relative to the one that you have already placed.

TileObject offers an integrated development environment for those who develop platform games with Xcode and SpriteKit. You can create a vast game map by adding dozens or even hundreds of graphical objects to the canvas. Use the same image multiple times. Flip an image horizontally. Flip the same vertically. Repeat an image consecutively or regularly to create a bigger graphical object. Find the positions of assets (graphical objects over the map) relative to the bottom-left corner and the center of the map. If you are finished, you can just let the application save the entire map as a texture atlas. And the application will even create a code file for Objective-C/Swift so that you can easily integrate your game tiles into an SKScene file as far as you are familiar with SpriteKit.   Continue reading →