Over the weekend I tried my hand at making a clone of Flappy Bird on iOS using Swift and SpriteKit. The game uses the excellent graphics from Kenney, which are public domain although well worth leaving a tip for. The first thing I noticed was how slow the iOS simulator was when it came to graphics rendering. The development experience became a lot smoother once I started running the game as a Mac app.

I’m putting up the code for some game projects that I did back in 2013, during my One Game a Month challenge. I only made it until the third month, until I couldn’t make time for it anymore. The code is not going to be very well structured - I haven’t even looked in there since releasing them! It was a good experience trying to ship projects on a deadline though.

(In the game, you are a town guard who has to control which visitors can enter a town. Some want to help the town while others have evil intentions, so the town’s progress depends on how many “good” visitors you identify and let in.) This year, I found out about the One Game A Month challenge, and thought it would be fun to participate. Like many gamers who happen to be software developers, I’ve always wanted to implement my own game ideas.