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

Organizing art into texture atlases


We will quickly overrun our project navigator with image files if we add all our textures like we did with our bee. Luckily, Xcode provides several solutions.

Exploring Assets.xcassets

We can store images in an .xcassets file and refer to them easily from our code. Follow these steps to prepare our .xcassets file:

  1. Open Assets.xcassets from your project navigator.

  2. You will see an empty AppIcon entry. You can leave it there for now; we will revisit the AppIcon later.

Collecting art into texture atlases

We will use texture atlases for most of our in-game art. Texture atlases organize assets by collecting related artwork together. They also increase performance by optimizing all of the images inside each atlas as if they were one texture. SpriteKit only needs one draw call to render multiple images out of the same texture atlas. Plus, they are very easy to use! Follow these steps to build your bee texture atlas:

  1. First, we need to remove our old bee texture. Right...