Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
1
Setting Up Your Game Scene and Adding
Your First Sprites
Sprite Kit is Apple's exciting 2D game framework released in September 2013 with iOS 7.
It is a graphics rendering and animation framework that gives you the power to easily an-
imate textured images, play video, render text, and add particle effects. It also includes an
integrated physics library. Sprite Kit is the first-ever game engine formally built into the
iOS SDK.
In this chapter you will learn what Sprite Kit is and how you create a new Sprite Kit game
using Xcode. You will then move on and create the beginnings of a Sprite Kit game starting
from scratch. You'll learn about SKNodes and their subclasses, and you'll also use an SKS-
priteNode to add both a background node and a player node to your game.
What You Need to Know
This section of this topic assumes you have a basic understanding of how to build iPhone
applications using Xcode and the Xcode Simulator. It also assumes you have a basic know-
ledge of the iOS/Mac programming language Swift. If you are not familiar with Swift,
there is a brief introduction in the appendix at the back of this topic.
This topic will not cover how to program. It will focus only on Sprite Kit game program-
ming.
What You Need to Have
To complete all of the examples in the topic, you will need to have an Intel-based Macin-
tosh running OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) or newer. You will also need Xcode 6+ installed.
You can find both of these in the Apple App Store.
