Reasons not to use SpriteKit for your game

Rant-Warning: This post distills 1.5 years of pure frustration into a couple of pages. Be warned: May contain explicit language. When Apple announced SpriteKit in 2013 I got pretty excited: Apple offered an alternative to Cocos2D and, to some extend, for engines like Unity and Unreal. Native to the iOS platform and — what I…

*SNIP* Release

Today I released my newest iOS game called *SNIP*. It has been in development for about a year and 2 months. Goal of the game is to master snipping a disc precisely and beating your friends’ scores. It’s available for all iOS devices starting from the iPhone 5s up to the iPad Pro. www.snip.rocks |…

Chain The Arc! released

Today my game Chain The Arc! made it into the AppStore and is now available for free on all iOS devices starting from the iPhone 4s / iPad 3. The game is the digital merge of bubblewrap and the domino effect poured into a relaxing game experience… It features 3 GameCenter leaderboards to compete with…

Creating a video game [Part 4]

Visuals Even though this game wants to stay minimalistic, I desired the animations to be crisp and attractive. The rotation had to feel satisfying. I wanted it to appear like each arc was loaded with tension and had a physical mass that developed momentum and transported energy to its successor. I experimented with around 150…

Creating a video game [Part 3]

In the last episode we have established the very basic concept of this game. Yet we do not have a game yet. We discovered the fundamental mechanic which we have to still develop a fun to play game around. The mechanic itself is already satisfying: I had a very, very unproductive day lying in my…

Creating a video game [Part 2]

After deciding that I wanted to develop around the idea of chain reactions, I started to brainstorm about the different kinds of them which I could use. It needed to be usuable in a space limiting, 2 dimensional game environment and not be overly random. As a long time gamer (pseudo) randomness is something I…

Creating a video game [Part 0]

I grew up in a neighbourhood with not a single child to play with and my allergies also denied me a pet companion. I was a very, very curious kid and absorbed every piece of knowledge I possibly could. My parents decided against the easy way of putting me in front of a television set…

MouseBeam released

As a long time fan of Apple’s Macintosh platform I saw great features come and go: Exposé, multiple Desktops and active corners once were great features and a match made in heaven… Until they became unusuable in Lion. Their long and horribly laggy animations (even on state of the art Macs) and the fact that…