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

Chapter 15. Introduction to Scenekit with ARKit

In the previous chapter, we saw how to integrate ARKit into Sprite. Although it is good for placing a game object in the real world, we also quickly saw the limitations of ARKit with SpriteKit, in that all the sprites are attached to a 2D plane and that plane will always look at the player. This removes the reality and makes the app look unnatural. In the real world, you don't see planes facing wherever you go. That's spooky.

With ARkit included with SceneKit, we can add 3D objects to a scene and look around the scene, and it will look as if the object is actually present in the real world. You can get real-world lighting information and make the objects have real-life lighting effects. Also, since we have real-world lighting information, we can have shadows and make the objects look as if they are part of the real world.

The popular AR mobile game Pokemon Go uses this to stunning effect:

Image courtesy of Niantic Labs

This makes a far more compelling...