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

Adding shaders to our game


A shader or an instance of the SKShader class is an object that represents an Open Graphics Library Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES) or (GLES). It is a fragment shader, which is an algorithm that modifies the drawing behavior of the node that it is applied to.

Note

Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) is an application programing interface that utilizes the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to render graphic elements.

You can use the effect shown in the following screenshot by applying shaders:

In order to apply a shader to a node, we need to create a SKShader instance from a fragment shader algorithm and assign it to the shader property of the desired object.

The shader creation and compilation takes a big amount of CPU memory. So that's why we need to keep in mind the following things:

  • Avoid initializing shaders while the game is running; it's better to create them when the game is being launched

  • Avoid modifying the algorithm source of the shader as it will recompile the shader...