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Comment by pa5tabear | Hacker News Reader

I recognized the name Catmull from Steve Jobs biographies... lo and behold you're talking about the Pixar President Edwin Catmull.

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Indeed; that's him! Edwin Catmull [1], along with Raphael Rom [2], created the Catmull-Rom spline.

It was perfect for the Galaga-like level in my game. I only need to define a few control points to create a robust flight path for the enemy drones. The cool thing about the Catmull-Rom algorithm is that the spline passes through the control points.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Catmull

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Rom

Curious -- were you implementing the drawing algorithm by scratch? or were you using any libraries?

Thanks for asking... I used Apple's SpriteKit framework [1][2]. It's essentially a 2D graphics rendering framework that primarily acts as an abstraction layer for OpenGL ES. In addition, it also offers several other "nice-to-have" features with regard to 2D game development (e.g., collision detection, particles, physics, etc.)

Of course, you could do all of the above without SpriteKit. For example, for all of the rendering, you would simply write everything directly in OpenGL ES.

There are also cross-platform options, like Cocos2d-x [3] and Marmalade [4].

Finally, if you've read this far, you might be interested in reading my general thoughts and feelings from when I finished the game [5].

Cheers!

[1] https://developer.apple.com/spritekit

[2] http://www.raywenderlich.com/category/sprite-kit

[3] http://www.cocos2d-x.org

[4] https://www.madewithmarmalade.com

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8888107

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