Introduction and Recap
In the last post, I talked all about the gritty details of gameplay for our game. This time I’ll be talking about how we plan to achieve these results. This includes discussing our coding language of choice and related libraries and frameworks. This won’t be as boring as it sounds.
Swift
Our programming language of choice is Swift. Why Swift instead of another language? Well, we wanted our game to be deployed to the App Store. Coding in Apple’s official language makes this pretty simple. Add on the fact we are using Xcode, Apple’s official IDE, it makes it as painless as possible for us. By painless, I mean relatively painless. I normally use a Windows computer, and while Swift can be written on many types of OS (including Windows), Xcode only supports Mac. Fortunately I have that option available to me, but it is slightly annoying that you can only put apps on the App Store if you have a Mac, even if you code the entire thing with another OS. Anyway, Swift alone comes with many advantages. It is pretty similar to other languages I have used before, such as C. I could go into more detail, but all you really need to know is that I shouldn’t have too much trouble using it. In addition, libraries do not even need to be imported for functionality. But what exactly is the engine of our game? Swift alone can’t make a game easily. Fortunately, Apple once again provides the answer.
SpriteKit
To keep it simple, SpriteKit is a general-purpose framework and game development engine created by Apple. In other words, it is the best option for people like us who want to create a game and put it on the App Store. It specializes in 2D games, and most importantly, allows us to load textures and animation directly with tailor-made classes. Obviously, there is a lot more to SpriteKit than this but there is no need to go into that much detail.
Conclusion
Once again, I have talked all about my project. This won’t change for the next post either, as I will be finally creating some physical parts of the project for the 0.0.1 version we are working on for next week. Speaking of which, while we have lots of mock ups and other preliminary design elements, I haven’t shown any of them off here. This will change next week. Look forward to this, as I will definitely be providing a picture to let you see a little on what this game will look like. Until next time.
