Book Image

Mastering iOS Game Development

By : Peter Ahlgren, Miguel DeQuadros
Book Image

Mastering iOS Game Development

By: Peter Ahlgren, Miguel DeQuadros

Overview of this book

iOS is an operating system for Apple manufactured phones and tablets. Mobile gaming is one of the fastest-growing industries, and compatibility with iOS is now becoming the norm for game developers. SpriteKit is part of the native SDK from Apple, and enables developers to make simple entry into game development without unnecessary overhead and a long learning process. SpriteKit also provides other functionality that is useful for games, including basic sound playback support and physics simulation. In addition, Xcode provides built-in support for SpriteKit so that you can create complex special effects and texture atlases directly in Xcode. This combination of framework and tools makes SpriteKit a good choice for games and other apps that require similar kinds of animation. Become a master in iOS game development through this fast and fun guide! In the beginning, we’ll tell you everything you need to plan and design your game. You’ll then start developing your game through step-by-step instructions using the various built-in technologies of Xcode. From there on, we discuss how to deploy your game to the iOS App Store, as well as monetizing it to make more revenue. You will also learn advanced techniques to improve your game playing experience, including better multi-tasking, improved performance optimization, battery management, and more. To end the book off, we’ll show you how to update your game with different features, then port the update to the App Store.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Creating a SpriteKit project in Xcode


Let's begin straight away by opening up Xcode and clicking on File | New |Project. You will then be greeted by the New Project wizard, which will look like this:

For this project, we are—obviously—going to select iOS | Application | Single View Application and then click on Next.

Once you do that, you will be required to fill in some details on the project, such as product name, organization name, and so on. See the following screenshot:

Fill in the required fields (if they aren't already populated) and then click Next. To begin, we are going to make some changes to the project. For instance, locate the LaunchScreen.xib file in the sidebar on the left and delete it by pressing Delete on your keyboard.

Note

The .xib and storyboard files are the interface files that you can use to create the interface of a view. In them you can create buttons, text labels, and other user interface elements.

You will see a popup asking if you want to remove the reference or move...