Book Image

Sparrow iOS Game Framework Beginner's Guide

By : Stein
Book Image

Sparrow iOS Game Framework Beginner's Guide

By: Stein

Overview of this book

An easy-to-follow guide full of descriptive step-by-step procedures on how to develop a game for iOS. With each topic, a new challenge will be tackled to get a deeper knowledge of the Sparrow game framework and gain the skills to develop a complete mobile experience. This book is aimed at those who have always wanted to create their own games for iOS devices. Perhaps you've already dabbled in game development and want to know how to develop games for the Apple App Store, or maybe you have developed Objective-C apps in the past but you are new to game development. In either case, this book will help with descriptive examples and teach you to develop a game throughout its course. Some experience in Objective-C and a basic understanding of object-oriented programming are required.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
13
Afterword
14
Index

Working with assets


When we develop a game, we load files. We probably load a lot of images too. These images are displayed on the screen and are the graphics of any 2D game.

We will also need to load sound files for playing music and sound effects. Other general purpose files include text files that are either localization or game information files, such as hit points for enemies, attack strength, or similar data that affects the gameplay of the game.

Game-relevant data may include saved games and level data. This gameplay-relevant data may not always be plain text; in some cases, they are binary files or they use a markup language such as XML or JSON. In the iOS and Mac world, the PLIST file format is very common and contains a specialized kind of XML format.

In some games, game engines and game frameworks go a step further when dealing with gameplay-relevant data in order to be more dynamic. They allow scripting through languages such as Lua and JavaScript. These scripts are loaded and executed...