Before Artsy, I taught iOS at a summer school in Princeton. I’m no ivy league-r, but the environment was perfect for experimenting with different methods of learning. One concept that stuck well was using games to teach language syntax.
I polished this idea till WibbleQuest was created. I pored many late nights, and fresh minds into the creation of a framework for building interactive fiction on iOS. It helped roughly a hundred odd kids get started in iOS. Now it’s helping me get into Swift.
I’ve been watching Artsy’s Eidolon as we build out the foundations of an app in Swift and wondered what would happen when I start contributing. So this weekend under the guise of ludum dare I’ve been re-writing it in Swift.
For reference, WibbleQuest was created in a time where you couldn’t use blocks ( only iOS4 supported it, and it had just come out ), NSArray & NSDictionary literals didn’t exist and CocoaPods hadn’t been created yet.
I started by building an application. I then started building a library. I deleted the application, and replaced it with a playground. Playground driven developlement is very similar to how I build things in ruby. Spend some time in the REPL then copy & paste it out. It’s been nice.
One thing that I have found the hardest is the same thing I found hard when I made WibbleQuest. Writing a story is hard. By orders of magnitude in comparision to this blog post. Writing a game framework is easier than writing a game.
Should I be writing a game? Should it be a story? Tinker on.