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

Creating animations in SpriteKit


Until this point, we have given movement to almost every node in the scene in order to make our game look realistic, but we still have our main character static and it doesn't look very normal. It looks as if the rabbit is floating over the ground.

In order to overcome this situation, we are going to animate the rabbit so that it appears as if it is running or jumping through the doors. Animating nodes consists of intercalating images with a little modification in relation to the previous one so that their visualization provides a simulation of movement.

The problem that this technique can produce is that the performance of the game can suffer alarmingly due to the large amount of images needed. To avoid this issue, we can take advantage of texture atlases, which are collections of images that contain all the images, thus reducing the number of draw calls.

In SpriteKit, we can create atlases easily by collecting all the necessary textures in a folder with the...