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

Loading and saving data


When playing games, users will usually need a way to store how far they have arrived in the game or some other information, such as the best score or the main character's name. Due to this, the game will be able to load this stored data or some other data, such as the position of the enemies in each level of the game.

In this section, we are going to learn how to store the maximum score that a player has reached so far. For this purpose, we are going to take advantage of the NSUserDefaults class.

The NSUserDefaults class

This class provides an interface to read and write information on the default system. This default system is the place where the preferences that are chosen on your game or app, such as the user's language, sound (enabled or disabled), and so on, will be stored.

A user default values can be of different types, such as Boolean, float, integer, double, string, data, array, and so on, and the NSUserDefaults class provides methods for all of them.

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