Penn J. - Build iOS Games with Sprite Kit: Unleash Your Imagination in Two Dimensions

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Imagine going back in time to visit the people who wrote for the original Atari 2600 game console and showing them games on an iPhone. Jaws would drop. Minds would be blown. Theyd probably check for smoke and mirrors.

Weve come a long way from the video game industrys humble beginnings. Writing games was a challenge back then. It still is today, of course, but the challenges then involved shoving individual pixels around, saving CPU cycles for rudimentary sounds, and interpreting raw player input from analog joysticks. Today, our challenges are often bounded more by our imaginations than by technical constraints.

And thats why we think youve joined us here in this book. You have an unprecedented amount of power in a computer resting in the palm of your hand. You want to write a game, and youd like to do it for iOS. We have good news for you.

Welcome to Sprite Kit! Apples exciting 2D-game development engine sports an excellent API to help bring your 2D game idea from paper to pixels. If youre already an iOS developer, then theres nothing else you need to do. It comes with excellent Xcode support and gives you a template ready to get started. It doesnt get any easier than this.

Sprite Kit provides the scaffolding for you to organize your game code, animate objects on the screen, play sound effects, handle touch events, simulate physical movements and collisions, and more. Any game that functions in two dimensions, such as platformers, puzzles, or overhead action games, will work great with Sprite Kits tools.

This book will help you learn enough to take your own 2D game idea and implement it with Sprite Kits building blocks.

The best way to learn Sprite Kit is to build a game...or two! In this book, well walk through all the steps to build two actual games (that are quite fun, in the authors not-so-humble opinions). We have chosen these games because they provide an opportunity to learn the way of the Sprite Kit APIs step by step.

Lets get to know these games.

This will be an infinite runner game, like Canabalt but in space. The goal is just to stay alive as long as possible and rack up points. Its a single-finger game, which makes it a great fit for the casual game market. Check out the sketches in the following figure: