Book Image

Swift Game Development - Third Edition

By : Siddharth Shekar, Stephen Haney
Book Image

Swift Game Development - Third Edition

By: Siddharth Shekar, Stephen Haney

Overview of this book

Swift is the perfect choice for game development. Developers are intrigued by Swift and want to make use of new features to develop their best games yet. Packed with best practices and easy-to-use examples, this book leads you step by step through the development of your first Swift game. The book starts by introducing Swift's best features – including its new ones for game development. Using SpriteKit, you will learn how to animate sprites and textures. Along the way, you will master physics, animations, and collision effects and how to build the UI aspects of a game. You will then work on creating a 3D game using the SceneKit framework. Further, we will look at how to add monetization and integrate Game Center. With iOS 12, we see the introduction of ARKit 2.0. This new version allows us to integrate shared experiences such as multiplayer augmented reality and persistent AR that is tied to a specific location so that the same information can be replicated on all connected devices. In the next section, we will dive into creating Augmented Reality games using SpriteKit and SceneKit. Then, finally, we will see how to create a Multipeer AR project to connect two devices, and send and receive data back and forth between those devices in real time. By the end of this book, you will be able to create your own iOS games using Swift and publish them on the iOS App Store.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Swift Game Development Third Edition
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Why you will love Swift


Swift, as a modern programming language, benefits from the collective experience of the programming community; it combines the best parts of other languages and avoids poor design decisions. Here are a few of my favorite Swift features:

  • Beautiful syntax: Swift's syntax is modern and approachable, regardless of your existing programming experience. Apple have balanced syntax with structure to make Swift concise and readable.

  • Interoperability: Swift can plug directly into your existing projects and run side by side with your Objective-C code.

  • Strong typing: Swift is a strongly typed language. This means the compiler will catch more bugs at compile time, instead of when your users are playing your game! The compiler will expect your variables to be of a certain type (int, string, and so on) and will throw a compile-time error if you try to assign a value of a different type. While this may seem rigid if you are coming from a weakly typed language, the added structure results in safer, more reliable code.

  • Smart type inference: To make things easier, type inference will automatically detect the types of your variables and constants based upon their initial value. You do not need to explicitly declare a type for your variables. Swift is smart enough to infer variable types in most expressions.

  • Automatic memory management: As the Apple Swift developer guide states, "memory management just works in Swift". Swift uses a method called Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to manage your game's memory usage. Besides a few edge cases, you can rely on Swift to safely clean up and turn off the lights.

  • An even playing field: One of my favorite things about Swift is how quickly the language is gaining mainstream adoption. We are all learning and growing together, and there is a tremendous opportunity to break new ground.

  • Open source: From version 2.2 onwards, Apple made Swift open source, curating it through the website www.swift.org, and launched a package manager with Swift 3. This is a welcome change, as it fosters greater community involvement and a larger ecosystem of third-party tools and add-ons. Eventually, we should see Swift migrate to new platforms.