SpriteKit – Anchors & Safe Area

I’m still on my SpriteKit journey and am ready to tackle a few more hurdles. Primarily, these include making some easy and reusable code to allow me to place one node relative to another. We will then expand on this solution to help us place one node relative to the screen’s edges. Finally, this solution will also show how to handle the “safe area” you’ll see on an iPhone X.

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SpriteKit Tile Maps Intro

A lot of sprite games include tiled backgrounds. Tile Maps are a special tool which allow the creation of these backgrounds without needing large arrays of nodes, which could otherwise potentially cripple your game’s performance. This post will provide a quick overview for tile maps and features including: tile animations, tile variations, 8-Way Adjacency Groups, Custom Adjacency Groups, and a Tile Definition’s User Data.

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SpriteKit Recipe – Custom Scale Mode

One of the first learning hurdles encountered with SpriteKit comes when determining how to get the contents from a scene to display as expected on various devices, each with their own resolution and aspect ratios. We will review a scene’s scaleMode property as a built-in solution that may work for some projects. Then, we will build a custom solution to overcome the limitiations we were otherwise stuck with.

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