Foreword

I first met Tammy Coron through the raywenderlich.com developer website. If you’re familiar with the Apple developer community, you probably already know about Ray Wenderlich and his online tutorial site, raywenderlich.com. If not, you may want to spend a few minutes checking it out.

Anyway, Tammy and I were—and still are—part of the raywenderlich.com team, which means we get to work with some of the best developers and technical educators around the world. In addition to being an author and editor on the site, Tammy was also one of the founding co-hosts of The raywenderlich.com podcast as well as the Apple Game Frameworks Team Lead.

I remember one of the first conversations we had: I was interested in writing a book and had just started the More Than Just Code (MTJC) podcast along with my co-hosts, Jaime Lopez Jr. and Mark Rubin. And Tammy—well, she was just hanging around the raywenderlich.com Slack channel waiting to connect with other team members.

MTJC was on a small break in its recording schedule, so I reached out to Tammy on Slack to ask her about the book-writing process. About five minutes into our discussion, we decided to fire up the microphones and record our conversation. Oddly enough, that conversation turned into a crossover episode between Roundabout: Creative Chaos (Tammy’s podcast) and the More Than Just Code podcast. In that “episode,” we talked about writing books, learning code, and whatever else came to mind; if you go back into the MTJC archives, you can still find that episode today.

Shortly after our recorded conversation, Tammy became a “sometimes” co-host of the More Than Just Code podcast. Despite her “sometimes” appearances on the show, Tammy always presents a fresh perspective, especially when we do our recap shows—like our year-end shows and WWDC recaps. Her focus is usually on the gaming side of things, while I focus more on the arts—although Tammy is also an artist. Jaime is our resident game player, which plays nicely against Tammy’s game-development career. And Mark is the intellectual who tends to dive deep into the nuts and bolts of code.

But Tammy isn’t just a game developer or “sometimes” co-host. She’s what you call a multipotentialite—a term coined by TED speaker Emilie Wapnick. A multipotentialite is someone who is equally good at multiple things—a sort of modern renaissance person, which Tammy certainly is.

On the More Than Just Code podcast, Tammy is our go-to person for gaming tech—and not just because she’s the one who’s made the most games. Tammy has a lot of experience with game development. She’s a champion of Apple’s SpriteKit and GameplayKit frameworks, and she also works with other gaming technologies like Unity and Unreal Engine.

But Tammy’s experience goes beyond simply using this tech; she also teaches others how to use it. With the backing of some of the most well-known technical publishers in the industry, Tammy has delivered video courses on LinkedIn Learning (formally known as Lynda.com) and raywenderlich.com. She’s also written countless tutorials and articles for print and online publication. She’s even co-authored a few books.

In addition to her teaching accomplishments, Tammy is also a skilled development editor (sometimes called a final pass editor), technical editor, and copy editor. One of her more recent edits is the new Apple Augmented Reality by Tutorials book, written by her friend and fellow raywenderlich.com team member, Chris Language. It’s funny—when you work with Tammy, you not only write a book; you also make a friend.

When it comes to Tammy’s book—Apple Game Frameworks and Technologies—she’s effectively combined all of her skills, distilling what she knows about 2D Apple game design and development, and then placing that information into a thoughtfully organized and substantial resource. Like a true renaissance person, Tammy has a way of taking complicated ideas and presenting those ideas so that they are easy to understand and fun to learn about and pull apart.

Tammy delivers the complete package. As an artist, she’s always drawing, so she creates all of the artwork for her games. As a writer, she’s always cooking up story ideas—and, yes, every game tells a story. As a developer, she’s always looking for the best way to write readable code. As an editor, she does her best to be clear and concise in her writing (although she does have a wonderful editor on this book, Margaret Eldridge, to help her stay on track). But her biggest asset—the thing she brings most to this book—is her commitment to guiding you on your hero’s journey to Apple game development.

We hope you enjoy the book as much as we do!

Respectfully yours,

Tim Mitra, with input from Jaime Lopez Jr. and Mark Rubin (hosts of the More Than Just Code podcast)