Swift Playgrounds Is Anti-Game Developer & That's A Shame

You might have heard about Swift Playgrounds and how it's the first official way to publish your creation to the iOS AppStore directly from your iPad. However, after months of work on ShapeGame (gonna need a better final name for this) it has really started to show some weaknesses in the game development aspect.

While I can get around the lack of .SKS files or require a lot more programmatically written code than you would have to do if you had a scene editor, it's not completely impossible. However, with Apple's omission of key capabilities like In-App Purchases and Game Center or even Game Controller support it's clear that they don't have the same vision that I have for Swift Playgrounds.

I'd love to see this become a tool for quickly prototyping larger games or even building small games from the ground up. I'd love to have more capability with scene editing and world development built into Swift Playgrounds. I think being able to use the pencil to draw title maps into the world and then interact with those maps in code could be amazing, but we're not there yet, and I get it this was the low hanging fruit.

What Swift Playgrounds 4 does is set the foundation for bigger things in the future. My fingers are crossed that these bigger things come sooner rather than later, but I know Apple takes their time and typically waits to ship things until they are polished enough for prime time.

So while Swift Playgrounds may not be the BEST option for game development it hasn't stopped me from attempting to use it and I'm going to be completing my game ShapeGame (without particle effects & Game Center) in the next few weeks. So get subscribed to see that!

#swiftplaygrounds #swiftUI #gamedev

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[SweetHoneycode]

It's clear they wanted casual apps like utility and such. I do agree that they could seriously updates this for the game devs too and corner this market.

[antlister]

Do you think WWDC22 in June might bring something more to Playgrounds for iOS? What would be on your wishlist?

[dksipun]

I have iPad Pro. How to use software like unity engine or any better alternative