iOS game

First steps with Super Spectrum Sphere

Glaxor

I spent some time in the last couple of days reviewing some tutorials on Sprite Kit development for iOS and working toward the functionality I outlined in my preliminary sketch of Super Spectrum Sphere. This Vine shows where I’m at and I also posted it on twitter with the #screenshotsaturday tag.

So here’s a list of what works and what I still need to implement.

Working:

  • Tapping “shoots” a new ball.
  • Balls change color when they bounce off the walls.
  • Balls “break” bricks of the same color.
  • Balls “break” when they hit a brick of a different color.
  • The boundaries of the play area are based on the center of the screen.
  • The play area is uniform across the two current phone screen sizes.

Still to be done:

  • Auto oscillating cannon that changes color automatically.
  • Ball vector based on cannon position.
  • Ball color based on cannon color.

And that’s just for the first iteration. Looking back through the code I’ve been writing just to get this far, it’s obvious I’m going to have to re think a lot of it to make it more robust. But for now I’m mostly concerned with making a playable prototype.

As I’ve been working I’ve had ideas on how I can make levels more complicated and interesting, but I’ve been trying not to think about that yet. For now, I need to focus on getting the core mechanics functioning so I’ve just been writing down my ideas and trying to forget about them for now.

Focus!

Super Spectrum Sphere: The first app I will put on the App Store

Glaxor
Super Spectrum Sphere sketch

I’m calling this Super Spectrum Sphere. This will be the first app of my own that I actually upload to the app store. It will be submitted for approval before September 30th, 2014.

This game is basically a Breakout variant. The main action is to break bricks with a ball. However, unlike in breakout, you don’t have a paddle to keep the ball bouncing. Instead you have a cannon which oscillates. The player will tap to shoot the ball from the cannon and change the color of the cannon. When the ball emerges it will be the same color that the cannon was when the screen was tapped. If the ball bounces off a wall or the floor its color will change to the next color in the ROYGBIV spectrum. If the ball contacts a brick that is the same color the brick will break and the ball will continue. If the ball contacts a brick that is a different color the ball will break and disappear and the brick will remain.

Multiple balls may be on the screen at the same time, but the fewer balls you use to eliminate all the bricks the higher your score will be.

I like to use a graph paper notebook to sketch out my designs. The screen area outlined in the image above is the approximate size of the screen area of an iPhone 5 or 5S. Older iPhones with smaller screens are about three grid units shorter than that. You may have noticed that I made four small marks on the sides of the screen area. Those mark 1.5 units from the top and bottom, accounting for the screen size difference between older and newer iPhones. I have designed the play area to fit within the space available on older iPhones with room for an ad at the top. The extra space afforded by the larger screen of the 5 and 5S will be taken up by the background graphic of the play frame.

Super Spectrum Sphere will be a free app monetized with ads. I have not yet decided which ad api I will use. I may launch it with Apple’s iAd and re-evaluate after monitoring the performance for a month. I’ve read that the iAd network doesn’t work in some countries.