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)

Chapter 5. Bug Squashing – Testing and Debugging

I'm still trying to catch my breath from the last chapter! Boy, did we ever do a lot of work! Now it's time to slow it down a little bit. After all that coding, we are going to discuss testing and debugging. Debugging is a critical step in the entire development process, as the appearance of bugs can ruin the experience of your app. You spend countless hours on it, and, if there are bugs, people will think it's unprofessional. That's certainly not ideal. Let's see what we will discuss in this chapter:

  • Testing our code on the simulator

  • Testing our project on various devices

  • Setting up TestFlight for beta testers

  • Squishing those bugs

We will slow things down for this chapter and will resume the coding soon! So, let's sit back and treat this chapter as a breather. But don't think it will be a cake walk! No no! While this isn't exactly as action-packed as our last chapter, as I mentioned, this topic is super-critical in all projects, so it's super...