This book contains six chapters that will guide you through the process of creating a video game with the tools provided by SpriteKit. At the same time, you will learn how to deal with the common difficulties that you may come across when developing games and how to apply the techniques that you learn here to give a stunning look to an app.

Chapter 1, The First Steps toward SpriteKit, covers the basics of developing a game with SpriteKit. In this chapter, you will learn what a game engine is and what a new SpriteKit project looks like. In addition to this, you will learn the purpose of the SKNode and SKScene classes and how to utilize them to add a background and a sprite into the game.

Chapter 2, What Makes a Game a Game?, shows the main techniques used in game development, such as moving sprites on the scene, detecting touches, and handling collisions. In addition to this, you will learn how to create and update labels and play music and sound effects.

Chapter 3, Taking Games One Step Further, teaches advanced techniques such us how to create complex nodes by extending the SKNode class or implement the parallax effect. You will also learn how to draw geometrical primitives and animate sprites.

Chapter 4, From Basic to Professional Games, helps us provide our game with the needed components to consider it as a finished product. You will learn how to create a Game Over condition for the game and a main menu scene from where you will learn how to transition to a tutorial that you will create for players so that they know the mechanism of the game. You will also learn how to save and load data from internal and external sources.

Chapter 5, Utilizing the Hardware and Graphics Processor, teaches you how to get the most advantage from the hardware of physical devices using the accelerometer or creating stunning visual effects by adding shaders, lights, and shadows into a game.

Chapter 6, Auxiliary Techniques, covers the development of special effects, which are also known as particle systems, and ways to combine SpriteKit with UIKit in order to create robust games and dynamic apps. You will also learn how to use third-party tools to create custom audio and fonts and find resources that can be used in games.

To follow the implementation of the code provided in this book, you will need the following hardware and software:

You will not need a lot of experience developing with Swift or SpriteKit as the chapters will help you easily understand how to utilize the tools provided by the game development framework.

If you are an iOS developer who wants to learn which tools offer the game development framework provided by Apple so that you can add an extra edge to your applications or learn how to bring to life the games that you have imagined in your mind, this book is for you. It has been written to teach the key concepts of 2D game development and ways to create 2D games using SpriteKit. This book will help you deploy framework tools to improve the visual experience of your apps.

There are several text styles in this book that refer to different type of information. For example, you will find words referring code that will look like the following line:

There are a couple of storyboard files, namely Main and LaunchScreen, which are responsible for showing the game screen and launch image respectively.

You will find code blocks that look like this:

import UIKit

@UIApplicationMain
class AppDelegate: UIResponder, UIApplicationDelegate {

    var window: UIWindow?

    func application(application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [NSObject: AnyObject]?) -> Bool {
        // Override point for customization after application launch.
        return true
    }

If you are expected to perform some actions on specific places of the screen you will find the instructions highlighted in the following way:

To create a new SpriteKit project, we need to open Xcode and then navigate to File | New | Project….

You will find instructions specifying the exact value you have to enter in a text field that will look like the following line:

Call it Enemy and choose the folder where you want it to be saved.

Hints, tips, advices and notes will look like this:

Sometimes you are going to be challenged by me, requesting you to try to solve a particular situation. These challenges will be labeled as 1-star, 2-star or 3-star Challenge depending on the difficulty of the task, but they can be solved with the knowledge acquired along the book:

2-star challenge: colliding puppets

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