Mark Brownsword

Introduction This article demonstrates how to overlay Button Elements onto an Hexagonal TileMap in SpriteKit. The buttons will stay fixed in place while the map moves and the buttons will respond to touch events by executing specific commands. The Hexagonal TileMap is an SKTileMapNode and the buttons are a composite of SKSpriteNode and SKLabelNode. Prerequisites […]

I’ve recently switched from an Apple MacBook to a System76 Galago Pro with Ubuntu 17.04 as my personal computer. The reason why is to make some dots. My observation is that we are converging on Linux as a deployment target for cloud applications and with .NET Core able to run on Linux, I felt inspired […]

Introduction This article explores the use of Entity Component System (ECS), Pathfinding and State Machine components in the GameplayKit Framework. I don’t make any claims of expertise on the topic of GameplayKit, other than I’m enjoying exploring an interesting topic that takes me through the fundamentals of Computer Science. Entity Component System I’ve done some […]

One of the new features added into iOS 10 and Xcode 8 is the SpriteKit Tilemap Editor. This editor provides a visual editing surface for SKTileMapNode which is described as ‘A node used to render a 2D array of textured sprites‘. The SKTileMapNode is represented as layers in the Tilemap and e.g. allows a building […]