For some reason, I’ve really wanted to make a game lately. I play them so often that it’s natural that I’d eventually want to make one. My recent renaissance in personal development is helpful in accomplishing this goal. But where to start?

A few days ago, I decided to try something easy, so I made a really simple console app in Ruby called Guess the Number. Oh, you’ve played this kind of game before? Heh. Well, making an original game is a future step. For now, I’m experimenting with recreating old ideas for the umpteenth time to get the hang of it.

Since I’ve become fairly adept at getting Xcode and Objective-C to do some things for me, and yet I still haven’t really cracked open developing for iOS, I looked into how one would make a game within it. Seems like there’s a built-in framework for just that: SpriteKit. It comes with a bunch of helpful methods to make a view with a scene in it, and then populate it with sprites that perform actions.

So far I’ve made a game where a ninja throws projectiles at ghosts, and then another one where a colored ship shoots projectiles at other colored squares. It’s kind of magical how little it takes to make a “game” (an app where you perform actions to accomplish goals until you either perform an ultimate goal and start over, or you die and start over).

I’m still largely at the copy pasta stage of programming when it comes to games, but I’m getting there! If I could only actually come up with an original idea, then I’d have a real goal to shoot for. Until then, I will keep making everybody else’s ideas, cuz you gotta start somewhere.