Last week's CompileSwift Swift Livestream was another great example of the technology rules working against you.

I spent around an hour and a half trying to get collision detection working on a very simple game that I’m building as part of my fun learning Swift SpriteKit and Livestream as I go. By the end of the stream, I was losing the battle and decided I needed to step back and rethink how I was building it.

Usually, it comes around that moment that you say out loud “it really shouldn’t take this much code to do this simple thing”. That is always the sign that you are way down the rabbit hole in the wrong direction.

So I ended the stream. Sure enough, 30 minutes later I realized what I believed to be the solution. A quick test and indeed it seemed like it was going to work.

I think the problem came from trying to do too many things in the ViewController rather than using a class conforming to SKScene. After making this change and a big re-write, the collision detection started working as expected.

So this week the stream will be going over where I think I went wrong and how I got it working, sometimes, it just needs another 30 minutes and removing the pressure of failing in front of a live audience.

Thankfully, either way, the chatroom is always active and a lot of fun with positive attitudes, so we still have a laugh and work the issues.

You can always find my live-stream schedule for Swift and Apple development at CompileSwift.live