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

Creating particle systems


You probably don't know what a particle system is, but I'm sure that you have seen a lot of them. If you think about some sci-fi or action films that you may have watched of late, you will remember that they are plenty of special effects made by computers such as fire, explosions, smog, rain, and snow.

These effects have something in common; all of them are composed of hundreds of small components, or particles, that create the desired result by moving or changing the size or color of each particle independently.

In SpriteKit, we can easily create special effects, which are also known as particle systems, thanks to the SKEmitterNode class, which allows us to create and render small particle sprites to get the desired results.

On the other hand, SpriteKit provides a visual way of creating an emitter and editing its properties using the Particle Emitter editor that's included in Xcode. In the following sections, you are going to learn how to programmatically create an...