I'm making a game on the iPad where the player swipes up, down, left, or right to move the character. An attack is controlled by touchesBegan:withEvent:
My problem is that the character attacks whenever he moves.
Is there a way to set up a swipe gesture so the code doesn't run touchesBegan:withEvent: until it sees if the motion is the beginning of a swipe or not?
This is not too easy of a task. Without using some custom gestures I would suggest you to try the combination of UISwipeGestureRecognizer and UILongPressGestureRecognizer. I know this sound silly but it is not: An UILongPressGestureRecognizer acts pretty much the same as the pan gesture so even if the finger is dragged you will receive events. You need to set some proper minimum duration till it fires (depends on the swipe gesture) and some large minimum drag length so it doesn't get canceled for dragging. You need to remove the touch event methods then and move the code to long press gesture action.
To explain the result, your long press gesture will (if set correctly) work just the same as touch events except it will wait for specified duration. If in that duration a swipe is detected your long press gesture will not fire. Seems just what you need...