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

The parallax effect


When developing two-dimensional games, you will come across a problem that traditional animators have been facing since the development of the cartoon, which is the difficulty of providing their creations with depth and the sensation of motion.

The technique used by animators to solve this problem is the one known as parallax effect, which involves the separation of scenes onto different layers and moving the background ones slower than the layers in the foreground.

This is something that is similar to what happens when you are traveling in an automobile. If you look at one side, you will see trees on the edge of the road passing by swiftly. If you then look a little further at a static object, you will see that it moves slower than the trees. Furthermore, if you look at the horizon, you will see that mountains almost seem static.

By applying the parallax effect, we make our brain think that there is depth in the scene (we achieve a three-dimensional effect) and movement...