In this chapter, we will be building a mole thumping game. Inspired by mechanical games of the past, we will build molehills on the screen and randomly cause animated moles to pop their heads out. The player taps them to score. Simple in concept, but there are a few challenging design considerations in this deceptively easy game. To make this game a little unusual, we will be using a penguin instead of a mole for the graphics, but we will continue to use the mole terminology throughout, since a molehill is easier to consider than a penguin-hill.
Before diving into the code, let's start with a discussion of the design of the game. First, we will need to have molehills on the screen. To be aesthetically pleasing, the molehills will be in a 3 x 4 grid. Another approach would be to use random molehill positions, but that doesn't really work well on the limited screen space of the iPhone. Moles will randomly spawn from the molehills. Each mole will rise up, pause...