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Author: Stacie

iOS Project Log 9

Masks

Did a lot of research on how to mask out my illusion layer for the game. Still coming up with questionmarks.

Textures

Researched a way to quickly throw a repeating texture at things. Not something you get for free with SpriteKit. I’ve been advised to look at Scenekit for a solution.

Graphics

I started stubbing in some basic screens/scenes using either quick random layouts or using assets from http://www.kenney.nl  My hope is that by showing my artists what I’m looking for they’ll be able to get up to speed and either modify or recreate some tiles in our style.

Pasted image at 2016_04_04 10_41 AM.png

 

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Shared a link explaining the basics of  how to make tile sprites for games.

 

Fashion reference

 

 

iOS Project Log 8

Post con funk 🙁

Oy, I picked up some bug at the conference and was pretty much too sick to do any substantial development.

Swift version updated, so I did start going through and removing the C style if/then loops, because I’m getting warnings now about their deprecation soon.

Some movement on design, the artists posted a brief wireframe (different from my earlier wireframe in Log 6) to our Invision project.

iOS Project Log 7

CocoaConf!

March 25th–26th, 2016

Not much happened project-wise, due to my attendance at CocoaConf Chicago.

I did meet a lot of fantastic people, and attended some very though provoking sessions on Swift. With time I hope I’ll be able to unwrap all the knowledge that I downloaded straight into my brain.

Some of the sessions I checked out were:

I also joined the Breakpoints Jam and played ukulele. 😀  (you can see me in the back next to the awesome Jean MacDonald.

iOS Project Log 6

Design:

Artists are out on Spring Break.

I did find some info on Ukrainian Castles. Hope that can inspire us.

I made some headway on sound design, deciding to focus on folk music.

Found an adorable lullaby about a sassy grey cat – and a YouTube video where I could hear it sung.  The link also had a midi version of the song, which I grabbed.

 

I found some other nice audio options at archive.org

Dream Passes By The Window CC – more info  Folk songs from over the Dniester captured Eugenia Yaroshinsky

Tutorial:

Learned a bit about SKLabelNode

Initially, when I added a lives counter to the child node, I could not seem to make the custom font appear.

This link helped me realize i needed to make sure the custom font was included in the build phase for the bindle.

How to add a true type font to an iOS project

 

 

I’m still having some hero control issues. I kept going over my code, finding little things that seem to help, but not fix my problem. ah, debugging… I ended up using git to help me compare code to the example code.  Seems that I had some variables set as optional vs required, and vice versa.

A friend told me that many of my errors were symptoms of CopyPasta. I’ll have to keep an eye on that type of thing in the future.

Exploring:

So, after all this 7 hours of tutorial, several other hours of debugging and research, I realized that this project would be a good candidate to use the GamePlayKit features for the things I want to do.

2015 WWDC Intro to GameplayKit

GameplayKit DemoBots

At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll be using them or not. Either way, programming the basics by hand will understand a bit of what GameplayKit is offering. I’m trying not to get sidetracked and stuck in a loop of constantly reworking the foundations. I could push that further out on the timeline.

Completion is always of more value than perfection. 

 

My next goal is to start getting things ready/resized to work for iPad sized devices and the level art, as well as making some new maps, add a timer, and change out the sounds.


 

Here is a bonus  A movie called “The Guide”  recently was released at international film contests regarding Kobczars and Stalin.

 

 

 

iOS Project Log 5

Lots of things happened this week.

Design

The artists are buzzing about with some on the general look and feel and our heroine design is also in the works.

We’re trying to use inVision for collaboration, but it’s new to all of us, so we’re learning all together. I copied lots of my mood board images over to an Invision Mood Board… it doesn’t work like Pinterest, but does some things that pinterest does not. My favorite invision feature for mood boards?  It grabs a color palette from each image!

Here is a character sketch of our Hero by E.M. Isn’t she cute!

herogirl

and some colors from N.P.

TTcolors

 

I made a couple sketches to explain the concept, ie that the hero is basically rock climbing up a tower.

TTsketch1-sla
Crossing a bridge over flames.

 

 

 

 

 

TTsketch2-sla
More tower wall, with a dragon in a cavern underneath

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I dashed off a brief wireframe for a common starting point. wireframe1.png

Research – Banduras, Kobzari

Since a lot of our inspiration is coming from traditional Ukrainian costumes, I searched for traditional Ukrainian instruments and came across a beautiful stringed instrument called the Bandura.

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This of course led me to wikipedia

Wikipedia: Bandura

Which led me to an amazing new fact:

Musicians who play the bandura are referred to as bandurists. Some traditional bandura players, often blind, were referred to as kobzars.

What?! This meant I hopped straight to the entry on the Kobzars

Wikipedia: Kobzars

In Ukraine, kobzars organized themselves into regional guilds or brotherhoods, known as tsekhs. They developed a system of rigorous apprenticeships (usually three years in length) before undergoing the first set of open examinations in order to become a kobzar.

Wikipedia: Preservation of Kobzar music

and this interesting list of recordings off off wax cylinders of actual Kobzar music! The recordings are rough, and the most popular ones are the roughest. Wax cylinder recordings degrade with each listen.

Tutorial

I’m 3/4 of the way through the maze games tutorial from CartoonSmart. I can load the maze and enemies from a json file, created by using Tiled. It’s a bit of a slog here in the middle, but I’ll push forward.