Book Image

Getting Started with SpriteKit

By : Jorge Jordán
Book Image

Getting Started with SpriteKit

By: Jorge Jordán

Overview of this book

SpriteKit is Apple’s game engine to develop native iOS games. Strongly boosted by the Apple Inc., Cupertino, it has increased in popularity since its first release. This book shows you the solutions provided by SpriteKit to help you create any 2D game you can imagine and apply them to create animations that will highlight your existing apps. This book will give you the knowledge you need to apply SpriteKit to your existing apps or create your own games from scratch. Throughout the book, you will develop a complete game. The beautiful designs implemented in the game in this book will easily lead you to learn the basis of 2D game development, including creating and moving sprites, and adding them to a game scene. You will also discover how to apply advanced techniques such as collision detection, action execution, playing music, or running animations to give a more professional aspect to the game. You will finish your first game by learning how to add a main menu and a tutorial, as well as saving and loading data from and to the player’s device. Finally, you will find out how to apply some mobile games techniques such as accelerometer use or touch detection.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Getting Started with SpriteKit
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Handling touch events


Our beloved main character is supposed to run though several doors, but some of them are closed and others are open, so it will need to move laterally to choose the right ones. We will need to handle the players' interaction to help the rabbit properly select a door.

By default, SpriteKit listens to touch events, and we can manage them by implementing some of the methods provided by the UIResponder class, which is the parent class of SKNode.

The following four methods are available if you wish to detect and handle touches:

  • The touchesBegan method: This method is triggered as soon as the user touches the screen, and it can detect one or more touches. That's why it receives a set of UITouch instances. We can use this method to select the place where we want the rabbit to be moved in the game.

  • The touchesMoved method: This method will be triggered when one or more fingers that are touching the screen begin to move. We can take advantage of this method to update a node's position...