Preface
There has never been a better time to be a game developer. The App Store provides a unique opportunity to distribute your ideas to a massive audience. Also, now Swift 3 has arrived! Apple's Swift language is maturing and hitting its stride in version 3. Whether you are new to game development or looking to add to your expertise, I think you will enjoy making games with Swift.
With this book, my goal is to share a fundamental knowledge of Swift and SpriteKit. We will work through a complete example game so that you learn every step of the Swift development process. Once you finish this text, you will be comfortable designing and publishing your own game ideas to the App Store from start to finish.
Please reach out to me for any questions and share your game creations:
E-mail: [email protected]
Twitter: @sdothaney
The first chapter explores some of Swift’s best features. Let’s get started!
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Designing Games with Swift, introduces you to the best features of Swift, outlines what is new in Swift 3, helps you set up your development environment, and launches your first SpriteKit project.
Chapter 2, Sprites, Camera, Action!, teaches you the basics of drawing and animating with Swift. You will draw sprites, import textures into your project, and center the camera on the main character.
Chapter 3, Mix in the Physics, covers the physics simulation fundamentals: physics bodies, impulses, forces, gravity, collisions, and more.
Chapter 4, Adding Controls, explores the various methods of mobile game controls: device tilt and touch input. We will also improve the camera and core gameplay of our example game.
Chapter 5, Spawning Enemies, Coins, and Power-ups, introduces the cast of characters we use in our example game and shows you how to create custom classes for each NPC type.
Chapter 6, Generating a Never-Ending World, explores the SpriteKit scene editor, builds encounters for the example game, and creates a system to loop encounters endlessly.
Chapter 7, Implementing Collision Events, delves into advanced physics simulation topics and adds custom events when sprites collide.
Chapter 8, Polishing to a Shine – HUD, Parallax Backgrounds, Particles, and More,adds the extra fun that makes every game shine. In this chapter, you will learn to create parallax backgrounds, learn about SpriteKit’s particle emitters, and add a heads-up display overlay to your games.
Chapter 9, Adding Menus and Sounds, builds a basic menu system and illustrates two methods of playing sounds in your games.
Chapter 10, Standing Out in the Crowd with Advanced Features, shows you how to combine the techniques you have learned to build advanced gameplay systems.
Chapter 11, Choosing a Monetization Strategy, outlines the strategies available to indie developers who want to make money from their games.
Chapter 12, Integrating with Game Center, links our example game to the Apple Game Center for leaderboards, achievements, and friendly challenges.
Chapter 13, Ship It! Preparing for the App Store and Publication, covers the essentials of packaging your game and submitting it to the App Store.
What you need for this book
This book uses the Xcode IDE, version 8.2.1 (Swift 3). If you use a different version of Xcode, you will likely encounter syntax differences; Apple is constantly upgrading Swift’s syntax. You can use Xcode’s Edit > Convert > To Current Swift Syntax to update the code examples in this book to a newer version of Xcode.
Visit https://developer.apple.com/xcode/ to download Xcode.
You will need an Apple developer account to integrate your apps with the Game Center and submit your games to the App Store.
Who this book is for
If you wish to create and publish fun iOS games using Swift, this book is for you. You should be familiar with basic programming concepts. However, no prior game development or Apple ecosystem experience is required.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The compiler will expect your variables to be of a certain type (int, string, and so on) and will throw a compile-time error if you try to assign a value of a different type."
A block of code is set as follows:
import SpriteKit
class GameScene: SKScene {
override func didMove(to view: SKView) {
}
} New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Launch Xcode and navigate to File | New | Project."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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