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)

Chapter 6. Making Our Game More Efficient

We have discussed quite a few debugging techniques, and there are a lot of them. Not all of them, however, help us when it comes to efficiency. What do we mean by efficiency? Your app can run great, but that doesn't mean it's going to cause the device to run great. Overheating, extreme battery drain, and other such things can ruin the gameplay experience.

With that in mind, let's get an idea of what we will cover in this chapter:

  • Optimizing our game

  • Preventing extreme battery drain

  • Preventing lag (or at least minimizing it)

This is a critical step in your game development, as you don't want people to complain and delete your app because it's too laggy (or causes the app to stutter because the device is having issues rendering the current scene) or it kills the battery.

I know you may have never experienced such an issue, but it happens more often than not.

What would happen if you had downloaded a game that was extremely laggy and killed your battery after...