Block Bomb Chevron

The story

Block Bomb Chevron is a 3D block-placement puzzle for iPhone and iPad. Drag pieces from a three-slot tray onto a grid, trigger cascading clears, and use bombs and chevrons to break out of tight spots. Built solo in Swift, SwiftUI, and RealityKit, with an ARKit mode that drops the board onto a real-world surface so you can play it on your kitchen table.

Game design and feel

The core loop is small and tight: three pieces in the tray, place all three to refill, keep the grid clear, chase a high score. Bombs detonate in radius; chevron pieces shift the board. A cascade state machine sequences clears, scoring pulses, and refills so that even multi-step combos read as a single satisfying moment instead of a flurry.

AR mode

Tap the AR button on the title screen and the game uses ARWorldTrackingConfiguration with horizontal-plane detection and automatic environment texturing to find a flat surface. Apple's coaching overlay handles the onboarding, then the first plane detected becomes the "tap to place" target. Once placed, the same RealityKit scene that runs on the standard view renders in AR (the controller layer is shared, so gameplay code is identical between the two views).

Rendering and shaders

Pieces, the grid, and the title and game backgrounds are all rendered with custom Metal shaders (BlockShaders.metal, GameBackground.metal, TitleBackground.metal) wrapped in RealityKit CustomMaterial instances. A shader-warmup pass runs on first launch so first-frame compilation doesn't stutter when the player drops their first piece.

Architecture

Game logic lives in small, focused files independent of the renderer:

• Grid owns the 3D playfield state
• PieceSystem handles the three-slot tray, piece generation, and bomb/chevron injection
• CascadeStateMachine sequences clears, scoring, and refills
• ScoreSystem persists scores and posts to Game Center
• DragState / GameState / Constants / Types keep the rest of the game cleanly typed

UI is SwiftUI throughout (TitleScreen, GameScreen, GameOverScreen, SettingsScreen, SplashScreen, leaderboard views, piece tray), so the same codebase scales from iPhone to iPad without parallel UIKit work.

DSGameKit

Block Bomb Chevron sits on top of DSGameKit, Designspin's reusable in-house Swift package. BBC uses the engine-agnostic parts: the systems/runner pattern, audio and haptic managers, the Game Center wrapper, ad management, and shared utilities. The same framework also powers Clay Rush's SpriteKit build, so improvements flow across both games.

Highlights

• Released and live on the App Store
• iPhone and iPad universal build, iOS 18+
• Built solo in Swift, SwiftUI, and RealityKit
• ARKit tabletop mode with plane detection and tap-to-place
• Custom Metal shaders with first-launch warmup pass
• Game Center leaderboards and achievements
• Powered by Designspin's DSGameKit framework

Status

Live on the App Store.