It’s been a week since I last blogged; here’s what I’ve been up to!
Accomplishments
- I created some art assets for the second level/scene, which has an autumnal theme. The screenshot below shows a funny bug (now fixed) in which a sheep would spawn in the wheelbarrow and be unable to escape.
- The corgi now blinks when idle and barks occasionally during the game.
- I created a struct called “LevelConfiguration” that reads information from a property list. The list contains information like how many animals should spawn, what the time limit should be, what sounds should be used, etc.
- For scene management, I decided to abandon the idea of a SpriteKit-only solution and ran back to something I’m more familiar with: UIKit and Storyboards. I set up bare-bones view controllers with simple UIButtons and UILabels that players can use to navigate to and from the main menu, options screen, etc. They’re not pretty, but they work, and now all I have to do is create art assets for them:
- After the timer for a level runs out, the game now waits 3 seconds and displays a score summary screen with options to retry the level, select a different level, or return to the main menu.
Under Consideration
Here are a couple of things I’m mulling over:
- Whether to have the different levels/scenes progressively unlock, or to make them all available from the beginning.
- Implementing a “medals” system similar to the one used in Flappy Bird with bronze, silver, and gold levels depending on how many critters you herd into the pen. And then maybe you’d need at least a bronze medal to unlock the next level? I don’t know. Still thinking about it.
What’s Next
Now that I have a very simple menu structure set up, it should be relatively painless for me to set up things like iAd, sharing a score via the share sheet, and adding an option to turn off the sound effects. My goal from now until the baby is born in March is to make it so that the only thing I have left to do is add the art, music, and remaining sound effects.
It looks like I started the Xcode project on November 20th, which means I’ve been working on this for a little over two months now (and sometimes only for a couple hours a week). With that in mind, and knowing that it’ll take me a long time to do graphics and music, I’m hoping it’s reasonable to expect the game to be ready to ship sometime before my birthday in July!