Procedurally generated components can be a lifesaver as well as a time-saver, but the basic problem is how to randomize it, for it to look natural.

The Why

Inserting a little chaos in our designs makes them more natural because it is known that nature doesn’t like order very much…

In that regard, we need to produce a natural-looking environment that has the right amount of randomness as well as being performant. Keep in mind that the solution shown here can be easily pre-generated and simply “feed” the points into the generator code to produce the 3D components. …

Like all good stories, this one starts with a quest as well. Make a board game with SwiftUI.
Trust me, once you find the right parts, it makes sense, tapping into State, conditional rendering and some good old fashioned algorithms makes the whole thing tick nicely.

The Board

First we need a nice board to play with. And we are creating it with SwiftUI in a few lines of code.

The Map

Our map looks like this:

We use two variations here, one single dimension and one 2D map for convenience…

Recently I was looking for ways to control animations that are baked in 3D Models with Swift but all I could find was bits and pieces over the internet with no robust way of handling key frame animations of 3D Models specifically in .scn format.

So upon decrypting the very vague Apple API documentation I came up with a procedure that is a good solution or at least a good starting point (because how animations are implemented with the various tools can vary greatly).

So let’s get cooking, we will need:

• Blender (open source 3D software) to export the model…

This is the story of a humble App until they met a powerful particle effect that added a so much needed “wow!” effect.

In this tutorial, we will create a cool exploding effect for a 3D SCNNode.

The User Interface way

On our XCode project, we create a new Group (with a folder) named particles and we add a SCN file inside.

Robots, or Bots as they are called, are a good way of automating tasks and provide users with generic or specialized feedback.

For this article, we will see how we can create a bot that informs the users of the weather conditions on their desired destination with some nice emoji and by digesting the WeatherAPI response.

The end result will look like this:

Recently I wanted to create a registration form using the Greek locale, and this had to be done in React native. Also this endeavor needed to support a pre-filled state in case the user wanted to edit some of the values.

Don’t be that guy trying to create a form and ending up with a blank screen!

So let’s begin!
The fields I needed to use for the form were the following:

- Name -> (input)
- Surname -> (input)
- Email -> (input)
- Phone number -> (input)
- Date of birth -> (date picker native)
- Terms and Conditions approval -> (checkbox)
- Privacy…

Pending requests/challenges is a great feature to have, especially for multiplayer games, however Facebook SDK doesn’t really give us many tools to go on, currently the only way to see any pending challenges is via the native Facebook menu when calling chooseAsync

And this is where this article comes into play. In order to achieve this we use a simple functionality that includes the context match-idand the opponentsuser-facebook-id

We will create two mechanics, one to receive Any challenges in any context from anyone, and one to receive pending challenges for the current context (this is especially useful for games that…

See part 1 here: Facebook Instant Games 1v1 Multiplayer using Firebase (Part 1)

On part one we explained the front-end of the multiplayer feature for a Facebook Instant Game, now let’s see the back-end logic using Firebase Firestore-DB and Functions (a sandboxed NodeJS environment to write backend logic without owning a server)

This is how you can get started:

https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/get-started?authuser=1

Now assuming that our environment is all setup, let’s write some logic to handle the front-end requests