Preroll Video iAd’s as Reward Incentive

A common Freemium model for mobile games is to offer a reward (currency, bonuses, etc) in exchange for watching a fullscreen video ad. Attempting to recreate this model using video preroll iAds is possible but has some less than ideal complications. I’ll be going over the basic implementation and the things I wish were different. […]

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fillip feast health dashboard

Game Health Indicator

This post is going to present a simple solution for building a dynamic health indicator for your game.  This is based on the health indicator we included in our Fillip’s Feast game, available in the Apple App Store. The following are the features we wanted for our health meter. Follow the overall look of the […]

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Working with Images in SpriteKit – Texture Atlas

By: Mark Johnson @mellowcoder  What is a Texture Atlas A Texture Atlas is simply a large image file that is created by combining together multiple individual images.  This can save memory and allows iOS to more efficiently render the textures in your application.  The nice thing about SpriteKit is that Apple takes care of building the […]

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Working with Images in SpriteKit – Image Sets

By: Mark Johnson @mellowcoder Asset Catalog – Image Sets This is the second in a series of posts on working with images in SpriteKit.  In this post we will look at using Images Sets.  Asset Catalogs and Image Sets were introduced in Xcocde 5.  If you start a new app in Xcode 5 the App Icon […]

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Working with Images in SpriteKit – Image Files

By: Mark Johnson @mellowcoder The following is the first in a series of posts on working with images in SpriteKit. Specifically how to manage image files when developing a Universal App.  This first post will be a general discussion of image sizes and look at the naming conventions that can be used when adding images directly […]

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SpriteKit Landscape Setup

By: Mark Johnson @mellowcoder Configuring a Landscape Only Game Using SpriteKit When we began developing our first game in SpriteKit we started out the same way that I suspect most everyone else does.  Open up Xcode and create a new game using the SpriteKit framework template.  The simple default app that is created worked fine […]

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SpriteKit – Understanding SKScene scaleMode

Moving from Cocos2D to SpritKit We have recently moved from Cocos2D to using SpriteKit as our game development framework.  In the process we have been experimenting with the various aspects of developing with SpriteKit.  This will be the first in a series of posts sharing what we have learned along the way. What is scaleMode? […]

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