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

Designing for Retina


You may notice that our bee image is quite blurry. To take advantage of retina screens, assets need to be twice the pixel dimensions of their node's size property (for most retina screens), or three times the node size for the Plus versions of the iPhone. Ignore the height for a moment; our bee node is 100 points wide, but the PNG file is only 84 pixels wide. The PNG file needs to be 300 pixels wide to look sharp on Plus-sized iPhones, or 200 pixels wide to look sharp on 2X retina devices.

SpriteKit will automatically resize textures to fit their nodes, so one approach is to create a giant texture at the highest retina resolution (three times the node size) and let SpriteKit resize the texture down for lower density screens. However, there is a considerable performance penalty, and older devices can even run out of memory and crash from huge textures.

The ideal asset approach

These double and triple-sized retina assets can be confusing to new iOS developers. To solve this...