It's quite clear that the project is far from complete at this stage. However, there are a lot of things that are a core of the game's implementation: the dragging, the scoring, and the grid formation. From here on, it's probably best to continue to iterate on the project and slowly add stuff until it's a fully working prototype with very minimal baseline mechanics working. For example, we could add some enemy spawning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the user's units automatically moving, and so on.
But as far as this book is concerned, we're going to move on as the point of this chapter was to go straight into a prototype. That's basically what we have here—something we can show our friends and family and say, "Hey, this is what the concept is, and this is what I've got so far." With the prototype, you can gauge things such as the following:
- Is the game board too small for the player's fingers?
- Is the concept too confusing?
- Is it hard to interact with the character?
With time, all of these will be sorted, but it's better to learn about the biggest problems early on rather than find them after your game has been published on the App Store and you notice that nobody is downloading it.
If you're following the book's tutorial/example project (which I hope you are), try adding the following on your own, all of which will be added outside this book for consolidation purposes:
- Automatically moving the red unit each turn and increasing its score
- Spawning a red unit every three or four turns around the border and adding it to the array (and possibly implementing the movement as you did with the previous red unit)
- Spawning another friendly unit with a value of
1when you move away from (5, 5) - Creating and maintaining a friendly unit array
- Making all friendly units move in the direction they were last instructed
Don't worry if you don't want to take the time to implement these by yourself. A later chapter will have them pre-implemented, and you can download the source code to get an up-to-date version before you begin that chapter.
However, it is highly recommended that you do try coding on your own, as that's the entire point of this book—to push you further as a coder. The tutorials are here for support, but the main purpose is to show you cool things and let you run loose with the tools at your disposal.