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...