There is an awesome article on Gamasutra about Coordinated Unit Movement. They also have a companion post about implementing said movement. However, the posts are from 1999, and they deal mainly in pseudocode. Also, I’m convinced there is absolutely nothing else on the entire internet explaining the topic. So, an experienced developer may be able to read the ideas and know how to implement them, but it has been a bit of a struggle for me as a new developer. I’m going to try to document a step by step implementation of formations, squads, and movement for someone who hasn’t done it before. I’ll be writing in Swift / Sprite Kit, but the code should be easy enough for anyone to follow. I also welcome corrections / improvements from experts.

Now that I’m receiving real art for my game, I thought it would be a good time to learn about memory usage and limits. This was also prompted by my current level running at 55-60MB before any gameplay action or characters loaded on screen. That memory usage seemed a bit high, so I decided this was an issue that I needed to delve into. In hindsight, most of this is basic to an experienced game developer, but I found the process to be quite fun. You can just read my lessons learned below if you don’t want to follow my detective work.

The introduction of Swift comes at a perfect time for me. I’ve been working on a SpriteKit game in Objective-C for 10 weeks now, and some of the code is definitely in need of refactoring. Refactoring is known to be tedious, so being able to learn a new language during the process is a plus. I’ve been taking notes of any challenge I’ve come across during the conversion.

Lighting effects were curiously missing from SpriteKit in iOS7, so I’m happy to see them appear in iOS8. Here’s a quick look at what you can expect from the light source / raycasting implementation.

I hated school. I hate technical books. Generally, I feel like I can learn faster with the unstoppable trio of myself, Google and wonderful online communities. The trouble with game development is I don’t know what questions to ask. In web development, I can search how to make two elements sit next to each other and find what I’m looking for. In game development, I wouldn’t have looked for a finite state machine, much less double dispatch for physics. I may be late to the party compared to other developers, but I’m finding myself humbled by both books and open source projects that are extremely well crafted.

Not surprisingly, dealing with zPosition in a 2.5d game is about as complicated as everything else in game development — it will be harder to handle than you think it should be. For example, how should you handle moving a sprite from behind a tree to in front of a tree in perceived depth. While the initial drawing of objects is straightforward, things become tricky once they start moving around. Let’s take a look at how I’m approaching zPosition in my Sprite Kit game.