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

Transitions and scenes


Usually, games comprise more than one scene. For example, games use a different scene to show a Configuration menu, to show the classification table once the game is over, to show a screen with in-app purchases, and so on.

Due to this, we need a way to move between the scenes. The solution that's provided by most game engines is transitions, which are also known as the SKTransition instances in SpriteKit.

The SKTransition class

The SKTransition class inherits from NSObject and provides us with the ability of creating animated transitions between the scenes of the game.

We have several methods in this class that will allow us to create different types of transitions. For example, we can choose one of the following methods:

  • crossFadeWithDuration: This method will create a typical cross-faded transition that will take the specified duration to end the transition.

  • doorsCloseHorizontalWithDuration: This will create the effect of a door closing horizontally, taking the specified...