Book Image

Mastering iOS Game Development

By : Peter Ahlgren, Miguel DeQuadros
Book Image

Mastering iOS Game Development

By: Peter Ahlgren, Miguel DeQuadros

Overview of this book

iOS is an operating system for Apple manufactured phones and tablets. Mobile gaming is one of the fastest-growing industries, and compatibility with iOS is now becoming the norm for game developers. SpriteKit is part of the native SDK from Apple, and enables developers to make simple entry into game development without unnecessary overhead and a long learning process. SpriteKit also provides other functionality that is useful for games, including basic sound playback support and physics simulation. In addition, Xcode provides built-in support for SpriteKit so that you can create complex special effects and texture atlases directly in Xcode. This combination of framework and tools makes SpriteKit a good choice for games and other apps that require similar kinds of animation. Become a master in iOS game development through this fast and fun guide! In the beginning, we’ll tell you everything you need to plan and design your game. You’ll then start developing your game through step-by-step instructions using the various built-in technologies of Xcode. From there on, we discuss how to deploy your game to the iOS App Store, as well as monetizing it to make more revenue. You will also learn advanced techniques to improve your game playing experience, including better multi-tasking, improved performance optimization, battery management, and more. To end the book off, we’ll show you how to update your game with different features, then port the update to the App Store.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Testing our project


No doubt you've been messing around with the iOS simulator (a feature that, to be honest, is very helpful, and that I found easier to access than the Android SDK emulator), which is awesome, but there is actually quite a lot that you can do with it without having to actually install anything on a physical device.

Let's open up our device simulator. To do this, inside Xcode, click on Xcode on the bar at the top, then click on Open Developer Tool, and finally click on iOS Simulator.

You will now be greeted with a pixel-for-pixel simulation of any iOS device of your choice:

As I mentioned earlier, I like to use the iPhone 4S simulator because it's small enough to fit on my screen, but you do have your pick of the litter. Is your simulator set to a device that you don't want? Want to change it to something else such as the glittery iPhone 6+? No problem!

Simply click on Hardware on the top bar. Then, under Device, you can select any awesome Apple mobile device you like! When...