Up until now I’ve had placeholder health bars that do their job as intended, but require a ton of manual work and take up a lot of memory. I’ve always had the goal of making the health bars work programmatically, and I finally got around to doing it. Well, version 1 at least. Have a look at how I’ve used SKShader, SKCropNode, SKShapeNode and CGPath all rendered to one final texture to make my health system work.

How do you launch a catapult, grenade, arrow, or any other projectile in an isometric world? I had to joy of figuring that out over these past two days, and I thought I would share. Before jumping in, let me point out that the code below is for my specific use case, and is not a full featured framework. So, you’ll still have to understand the concepts, but if you’re Googling for help this will hopefully get you on the right track.

Memory leaks suck. You know they exist, and you dread the day you have to track them down. In SpriteKit, I’ve encountered two main types of leaks. One is where the entire scene is not deallocated after transitioning to a new scene. The other is where memory is constantly being used up while interacting with a scene. For the latter, you have to use Instruments in XCode, or comb over your code, to get a handle on what is happening. But, for cleaning up scenes after you’re finished with them, here are a few tips that simplified the process for me.

This purpose of this post is to document some of the frustrations with pathfinding. I’m finding that it is too boring to try to implement every map at once, so I’m touching pathfinding every other week or so. As a refresher, the video below has served as my primer on GKObstacleGraph whenever I need to revisit pathfinding. So, if you’re a SpriteKit / GameplayKit user, you may find my approach interesting.

If you’re new to game development, you’ve probably heard of shaders but don’t quite understand them. If you’re new to SpriteKit, you’ve probably hit a few speed bumps working with shaders. Since I’m still learning more about the two, I figured it would be nice to put up a concrete example that covers cropping and effects using shaders. Specifically, we’ll cover two concepts:

When searching for tips on how to save game data in SpriteKit, most posts explain how to save one variable (high score, for example). In that regard, this Thinking Swiftly post was extremely helpful, and is where a majority of the code below comes from. I just wanted to extend that post, and look at how an entire object could be saved in a self contained way.

Cutscenes are a labor of love, so it is hard accepting that some people just don’t care. That story that took months to bring together may be amazing to you, but to others it is just an inconvenience. So, for that reason, we have to make cutscenes skippable. However, I didn’t want to just settle at skipping the entire scene. I wanted to also make it skimmable for the speed readers, or those who are mildly interested.

It’s funny how the tasks that should be easy end up consuming the most amount of time. As of this writing, there is no easy way to outline text in SpriteKit. It’s common to see approach that add a shadow node, but sometimes more contrast is needed. Here’s what I have discovered.