How I started to create my first game app without any knowledge of SpriteKit
In this incredibly technological world, one thing is for sure, anything you can think of, you can learn: one online course, one Youtube video, one Medium article et voilà, you can achieve anything you set your mind to.
At first, I was very concerned on how I would manage to create a whole game, by myself, in less than 3 weeks. But soon enough, the fear left space to excitement. I started thinking about what kind of game I wanted to create and decided to reach out to my sister for help on the design part, so I could completely focus on the code. In one day we managed to figure out the kind of game, the type of character and its animations, the environment, the obstacles, the mechanics, and everything finally began to make sense. But a big adversity was still, in fact, the coding part, which was all on me.
Since my code knowledge was pretty much close to zero, I started to watch as many Youtube videos as possible, in order to understand a bit more about this new language I wasn’t very familiar with. It didn’t take long, though, before I started my actual journey into the coding bit because I was way too excited about it.
The game I decided to build was a simple endless runner, with a couple of obstacles here and there and very cute animations. Nothing simpler right? I thought so too. But the road ahead was definitely a bit more troubled than expected. Here’s where it all started.
First thing I decided to understand was how to make an endless scroller and this was my first attempt:
But this was not exactly what I was looking for. However it was a start.
So, next I began to watch this series of videos on SpriteKit which were also on how to make an endless side scroller. But I was pleasantly surprised because in that playlist there was also a tutorial on how to work on physics, create a character as well as some obstacles, applyForce and applyImpulse. This was exactly what I needed! So I followed it up step by step and my game started to take form. However, not all I needed was, of course, included in that tutorial and another problem I had to face was having a much more updated version of Xcode compared to the videos, so some bits of code were not working for me, stalling the whole process.
You might not believe it, but this was the most frustrating part as well as the most exciting and rewarding: first, because I had to figure out on my own how to fix those parts of code that were not functioning properly and, second, because I actually had to write code from scratch in order to make the game work as I wanted to. Then, thanks to a combination between Stack Overflow and the Apple Developer Documentation, I managed to substitute those initial simple shapes with actual images. Finally, I was able to create a Start View with a play and an info button and was able to switch from one scene to the other, following another very helpful tutorial (thanks to which I managed also to add a Highscore and a Recent Score Lebel!). So now the game was finally coming to life! In four days I had a pretty good solid unfinished game I was very proud of.
But I soon found out that there were quite few bugs here and there, that kept popping up and that I was not expecting at all! But I guess you do learn as you go and they made the whole thing a bit more fun.
And these are just a couple of the many encountered!
But anyway, once I fixed them, there were still a lot of things I wanted to perfect and to add: how to kill my character, animate it and also add some scores, coins, and speed it up gradually. And in around a couple of weeks I managed actually to figure out almost all of them. So, even though the initial idea changed a lot during the making of it, this is the latest version as if of now:
It is true that I did not manage to accomplish everything that I wanted to, and the overall game is of course not yet finished. But one thing is for sure, I learned more than I thought it was possible and honestly surprised myself on how much I achieved in so little time. I enjoyed this crazy journey that led me to go to sleep at 2am every night, dream strings of code and get crazy mad at my computer. Of course, I cherish every frustration, every little success, every mistake and every help I’ve been given, because it was all part of a learning process that brought me were I am now. And this proved me, again and again, that when you have the means and you are passionate and motivated enough, there is no limit in what you can create and achieve.
(Big thank you to all the people that supported me and put up with me through this journey, but especially to that beautiful creative mind that is my sister, for each and every asset, idea and minute of work spent on this exciting adventure.)
Download it from the App Store or scan the QR code to enter the adventurous world of Mine Escape! Any feedback is always well received. Enjoy.
(Awesome poster by my sister Giulia Ciotola!)
