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

Improving the camera


Our camera code works well; it follows the player wherever they fly. However, we can improve the camera to enhance the flying experience. In this section, we will add two new features:

  • Zoom the camera out as Pierre Penguin flies higher, reinforcing the feeling of increasing height.

  • Suspend vertical centering when the player drops below the halfway point of the screen. This means the ground never fills too much of the screen and adds the feeling of cutting upwards into the air when Pierre flies higher and the camera starts tracking him again.

Follow these steps to implement these two improvements:

  1. In GameScene.swift, create a new variable in the GameScene class to store the center point of the screen:

    	var screenCenterY:CGFloat = 0 
  2. In the didMove function, set this new variable with the calculated center of the screen's height:

            // Store the vertical center of the screen: 
    screenCenterY = self.size.height / 2 
  3. We need to rework the didSimulatePhysics function significantly...