Blog Pav Blog

Tag: Game Development

  • Emoji Tac Toe Opened Sourced

    Happy Father’s Day!   To celebrate my 28th Father’s Day I’ve opened sourced Emoji Tac Toe. It’s actually not a big deal to anyone but me. It’s kinda of scary open sourcing code that you wrote alone and without first cleaning it up. But what the heck. If someone can learn something from this code,…

  • Binge Watching Handmade Hero

    For the last several weeks I’ve been obsessed with one TV show. It’s changed my viewing habits, my buying habits, and my computing habits. Technically it’s not even a “TV show” (if your definition of that term doesn’t include content created by non-professionals that is only available for free over the Internet). But for me,…

  • Identity used to sign executable no longer valid

    The last thing I wanted to do on a Sunday morning is write a blog post about an an Xcode executable problem. What I had planned to do is test my most recent Swift 2.0 SpriteKit game on my iPad and iPhone. Last night I got a “Identity used to sign the executable is no…

  • Cocos2D-Swift 3.0: A great way to get started developing iOS games!

    If you’re new to iOS game development now is a great time to get started. In 2008 a brilliant engineer named Ricardo Quesada rewrote his 2D game engine for Apple’s iOS and released it as open source. It’s no exaggeration to say that hundreds of games, like my own, were developed using Cocos2D-including dozens of…

  • Sprite Kit, Retina, iOS7 and Getting It Right

    I spent more time that I care to admit figuring out how to reconcile my old Dungeonators code with Apple’s Sprite Kit, Retina displays, and iOS 7. Along the way I searched the web for help and ran into tons of tutorials and advice for indy game developers (I highly recommend    www.raywenderlich.com  for a…

  • Re-doing Dungeonators

    One thing I think all software developers love to do is to make software for “the heck of it.” Hacking something together without having to worry about users, open source community members, and code reviews, is something devs don’t get to do often in these days of test-driven, agile, minimum viable products. Back in 2011…

  • ARC Memory Management in iOS 5 and Cocos2d-iPhone 2.0

    My rewrite of Dungeonators is crawling along at a glacial pace. Mostly because I can only work a couple of hours a week on the project. But the iOS 5 way to manage memory with ARC (automated reference counting) is making the process far less painful than it was the first time I wrote my…

  • Dungeonators Battle UI Redesign

    There is nothing quite like real user feedback. The Dungeonators game that I started coding about a year ago has been through several design iterations. Before I wrote a line of code I mocked up the whole UI and tested that on my friends and kids (paper prototype, an honorable UI design tradition). And with…

  • Sprite Playground

    I wrote a little Cocos2d-iPhone test app and committed the project to GitHub. (Like every dutiful hacker should.) You’re welcome to download the project and fool around with the code. My goal was to figure out how to create a composite sprite, make sure it could respond to touches, and rotate and move it round…

  • Cocos2d-iPhone Sprite Rotation to an Arbitrary Point

    I had some time during the Thanksgiving weekend to work on Dungeonators. I’m hoping to get an upgrade out to the App Store soon. One thing I needed //TODO: is refactor my rather poor implementation of rotating a sprite to face another sprite. My original code worked ok, in a roundabout way, but was ugly…