Wednesday, November 18, 2015

How To: Pre-Process Tilemap Overlays in MKMapView

Hi all.

Time for another tutorial. Recently I was trying to modify a tilemap returned from a typical public map overlay server (such as openstreetmap.org) - basically I needed a way to change black areas of the tile into transparent so that I could nicely overlay it on top of MKMapView. I searched for this for a while, found some solutions but did not really work as I wanted. Some examples used MKTileOverlayRenderer. Somehow that gave me weird results that I do not understand.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

LONG LIVE XIBs!!!! Create an iOS app without storyboards in XCode

Are you one of those devs who don't like Storyboard? I didn't even bother to learn about Storyboards and how to use them. Call me stubborn noob that's ok. But I am so used to programmatically create things on XCode so storyboards are not my thang.

So how do you do this with latest XCode? If you go to New Project LO AND BEHOLD no such thing as a project without storyboards. All of them has storyboards. Unless you go with the absolute empty project.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

SKScrollView: SKSpriteKit ScrollView for Games Levels

Hey guys how are you doing? Hope you are doing great.

I have a sample project to share. Well, as usual, I wanted to do something and then search around and most of available solution is way too complicated or not to my liking. So I MAKE ONE MYSELF. YAYYYYYYY xD Great way to spend my Sunday evening with a cuppa coffee.


Wednesday, August 12, 2015

SKSpriteKit: How to fill SKScene background with a Texture? (Code Snippet)

Yo guys.

Just submitted my latest iOS game. Check out the demo video here: FreakOut - Tribute to Breakout (iOS Game)

Anyways, I am updating one of my apps - Particle X to include the SpriteKit support. One thing that I need is to put a background texture to the SKScene background. In a normal UIView, we can simply specify self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage:yourUIImageHere]; and iOS will repeat that texture throughout the UIView. Which is cool.

But unfortunately there is no such method in SKScene. 

Sunday, June 7, 2015

How To: SKLabelNode Border Outline Quick Hack

Hey guys.

Today I would like to share you a simple hack on SKLabelNode. Since it is a simple snippet, there will be no project to download.

I am making my latest game (FreakOut) and was in need of SKLabelNode with outline. There are some 3rd party codes but I just want a simple and quick hack for it. So I made up this method:

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Atari Online Voice Synthesizer

WAZZZUUPPPPP

This is not a tutorial. But I have something cool for you. See I am in the making of my 5th iOS Game, then in need of some 8 bit voice. Freesound.org, gives me some. But I need to have it say a certain customized words. So I went on and search for the Atari Simulator for Mac. Found some, but I can't figure out how the heck do I install the speech simulator.

Upon searching further I encountered this cool online Voice Synthesizer that sounds exactly like the one I want - Atari version! So without further delay here is: