Hi yall! I thought I could dig in to some coding a little bit and build my first accessible game entirely in Swift Playgrounds! It’s a simple game inspired by a carnival game in which a person swings a mallet to test their strength with the goal of ringing a bell and earning points. In tghis game, you start off with 12 swings, with a missed hit or attempted hit losing you one swing and a bell ring earning it back.
Features: Score tracking, the ability to reset both high score and your current score, a New Game button that lets you start the game over with 12 swings, fully VoiceOver compatible, sound effects that closely mimic the mallet and bell, and a Settings screen that lets you choose your difficluty.
Here is a short YouTube demo: https://youtu.be/rsZBB9bVbvM?si=No8eDgc-BeR_JY9S
By Hannah Main, 19 May, 2025
Forum
iOS and iPadOS Gaming
Comments
Congratulations
I'm a seasoned developer, totally blind for 11 years, love coding, and have historically spent a lot of time sharing everything I know with everyone who wants to learn, because this ability to build stuff out of pure ideas is so powerful, and the results of experiencing your own ideas in reality is so uplifting and addictive in a good way, that I think everyone should experience it at least once in life. Unfortunately most people seem to have some kind of mental blockage preventing them from learning, and of those who can learn, only a small few seem to have the right self-teaching instinct, so what I usually do is try to demystify things in hopes that by showing people how to tackle complex logical problems by breaking them down until they become cognitively manageable, I can make the pieces fall into place in their heads and show them how to learn by themselves. In this context, hearing about someone successfully getting into the field all by themselves just feels great!
As for the video, while the game mechanics are not very clear to me from audio alone, the fact that you managed to build it, make it accessible, and even make it play audio clips is a really good achievement, especially if you just got started. Next step should probably be learning to use Xcode on macOS, followed by learning to use git so you can snapshot your progress over time and take advantage of all the benefits of using a version control system.
Welcome to the field! Be warned that you're getting into a pretty deep rabbit hole in which I've been happily lost exploring for 28 years at this point. The learning never ends, knowledge grows exponentially so your learning rate will increase a lot over time, however so does technology so you'll never hit a plateau, which is precisely what I love about this. If you keep it up, you will eventually reach a point in which your potential to change the world all by yourself becomes so great that the sheer amount of available possibilities will become your biggest problem. Best of luck!
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Edited to modify the first paragraph in a way that what I was trying to say actually makes sense.
can I have the link
sounds a very simple but intersting game...
can I have the app store link?
Awesome!
Awesome! what app did you use to record that youtube video? screen record?
Impressive
Hello,
THis is impressive. How did you do working with swift playgrounds? I have tried using it in the past but had too many issues. Focus would jump around and I would often get stuck when trying to move to my errors in the code.
Amazing. I am more impressed…
Amazing. I am more impressed by the fact that you did this just with swift playground!
Congrats and best of luck!
Hey congrats on starting your game dev journey!
AppleVis App Directory
Hello.
Could you please put this app into the AppleVis App Directory?
Help and Collabs Needed
Hi! Just giving a little update on this post. Unfortunately, I do not have MacOs so I can’t export the app to Xcode. However, any fellow developer who is willing or intrested in helping me polish up the game and send it to the App Store or Test Flight can contact me by email and I can share the Swift App project with you! Email: [email protected]. Thank you!
Re: Help and Collabs Needed
I read your post earlier but was quite busy so I couldn't even reply. Anyway as I said before, helping people learn is kind of a form of entertainment for me, so I'll volunteer to assist.
What I think we can do, since you can't use git and thus collaborating over GitHub is completely out of the equation, is to share a writable folder over iCloud Drive with you, so you can move or copy the project there, and I can review the code and, if I feel there's a need, suggest changes with detailed explanations in order to convey my train of thought. I can also put your project under git's version control in the same directory so if you feel that you messed up I can restore, revert, or reset any undesired changes you make. My approach will always be hands-off though, I'll just be reviewing code and providing advice, but not modifying anything other than making any rollbacks that you think are needed. As for publishing to TestFlight and the App Store, you'll need to do it yourself, because while I do have an active individual developer license, I cannot publish under someone else's name. I think you can actually do this through Swift Playgrounds but this requires enrolling into the paid developer program.
Later today, and if you don't oppose any of this, I'll send you an E-mail from the address associated with my Apple Account asking for yours, and once I know what your Apple Account is, I'll then send an invitation to collaborate on a shared folder.
Building apps in swift playgrounds
So you can only build an app with swift playgrounds with the new ipads only right?
I have the Ipad 6th generation.