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)

Level design and implementation


This is where we can have a lot of fun! We are now going to start designing our levels. You can spend hours adding the little details to each level to make them look perfect. Remember, a well-designed level will impress players and will give your game a professional look.

Unfortunately, Xcode just doesn't have the drag-and-drop ease of level design, so we are going to create our maps using a third-party program called Tiled Map Editor, which can be downloaded for free at www.mapeditor.org.

I have included a sprite sheet for our levels as well as a built level in the Resources section of this book. Do you remember the JSTileMap library that was included as well in this chapter? It's what is going to display these maps as SpriteKit doesn't support TMXTileMaps. So sad!

Anyway, moving on! Open up the level I have included, entitled level1.tmx, and get a feel for how the program works.

The side bar of Tiled shows you the different layers of the levels. In this case...