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Swift 3 Game Development

Swift 3 Game Development

By : Haney
4.5 (6)
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Swift 3 Game Development

Swift 3 Game Development

4.5 (6)
By: Haney

Overview of this book

Swift is the perfect choice for game development. Developers are intrigued by Swift 3.0 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. This book starts by introducing SpriteKit and Swift's new features that can be used for game development. After setting up your first Swift project, you will build your first custom class, learn how to draw and animate your game, and add physics simulations. Then, you will add the player character, NPCs, and powerups. To make your game more fun and engaging, you will learn how to set up scenes and backgrounds, build fun menus, and integrate with Apple Game Center to add leaderboards and achievements. You will then make your game stand out by adding animations when game objects collide, and incorporate proven techniques such as the advanced particle system and graphics. Finally, you will explore the various options available to start down the path towards monetization and publish your finished games to the App Store. By the end of this book, you will be able to create your own iOS games using Swift and SpriteKit.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
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Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
1. Designing Games with Swift
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1. Designing Games with Swift
Why you will love Swift
Prerequisites
What you will learn in this book
New in Swift 3
Setting up your development environment
Exploring the SpriteKit demo
Examining the demo code
Cleaning up
Summary
2
2. Sprites, Camera, Action!
2. Sprites, Camera, Action!
Sharpening our pencils
Checkpoint 2-A
Drawing your first sprite
Building a SKSpriteNode class
Adding animation to your toolkit
The story on positioning
Adding textures and game art
Designing for retina
Organizing your assets
Centering the camera on a sprite
Checkpoint 2-B
Summary
3
3. Mix in the Physics
3. Mix in the Physics
Laying the foundation
Renovating the GameScene class
Exploring the physics system
Checkpoint 3-A
Exploring physics simulation mechanics
Bee meets bee
Checkpoint 3-B
Summary
4
4. Adding Controls
4. Adding Controls
Retrofitting the Player class for flight
Assigning a physics body to the player
Polling for device movement with Core Motion
Checkpoint 4-A
Wiring up the sprite onTap events
Teaching our penguin to fly
Listening for touches in GameScene
Fine-tuning gravity
Spreading your wings
Improving the camera
Pushing Pierre forward
Tracking the player's progress
Checkpoint 4-B
Summary
5
5. Spawning Enemies, Coins, and Power-ups
5. Spawning Enemies, Coins, and Power-ups
Introducing the cast
Locating and adding the art assets
Adding the Power-up Star
Adding a new enemy - the Mad Fly
Another terror - Bats!
Guarding the ground - adding the Blade
Adding the coins
Organizing the project navigator
Testing the new game objects
Checkpoint 5-A
Preparing for endless flight
Summary
6
6. Generating a Never-Ending World
6. Generating a Never-Ending World
Designing levels with the SpriteKit scene editor
Encounters in endless flying
Checkpoint 6-A
Spawning endless encounters
Spawning the Power-up Star at random
Turning bronze coins to gold
Checkpoint 6-B
Summary
7
7. Implementing Collision Events
7. Implementing Collision Events
Learning the SpriteKit collision vocabulary
Adding contact events to our game
Assigning categories to game objects
Preparing GameScene for contact events
Checkpoint 7-A
Player health and damage
Animations for damage and game over
Checkpoint 7-B
Summary
8
8. Polishing to a Shine - HUD, Parallax Backgrounds, Particles, and More
8. Polishing to a Shine - HUD, Parallax Backgrounds, Particles, and More
Adding a HUD
Parallax background layers
Checkpoint 8-A
Harnessing SpriteKit's particle system
Granting safety as the game starts
Checkpoint 8-B
Summary
9
9. Adding Menus and Sounds
9. Adding Menus and Sounds
Building the main menu
Adding the restart game menu
Checkpoint 9-A
Adding music and sound
Playing sound effects
Checkpoint 9-B
Summary
10
10. Standing Out in the Crowd with Advanced Features
10. Standing Out in the Crowd with Advanced Features
Adding fun crates to smash open
Recycling emitter nodes with particle pools
Checkpoint 10-A
Wiring up crate contact events
Adding a health crate
Smashing coin crates
Checkpoint 10-B
Summary
11
11. Choosing a Monetization Strategy
11. Choosing a Monetization Strategy
Developing your marketing plan
Leveraging crowdfunding
Showing display ads for revenue
Selling in-app purchases
Localization into foreign markets
Managing scope and completing projects
Summary
12
12. Integrating with Game Center
12. Integrating with Game Center
Registering an app with iTunes Connect
Creating a test user
Authenticating the player's Game Center account
Opening Game Center in our game
Checkpoint 10-A
Adding a leaderboard of high scores
Adding an achievement
Checkpoint 10-B
Summary
13
13. Ship It! Preparing for the App Store and Publication
13. Ship It! Preparing for the App Store and Publication
Finalizing assets
Designing the launch screen
Uploading our project from Xcode
Submitting for review in iTunes Connect
Summary

Setting up your development environment

Learning a new development environment can be a roadblock. Luckily, Apple provides some excellent tools for iOS developers. We will start our journey by installing Xcode.

Introducing and installing Xcode

Xcode is Apple's Integrated Development Environment (IDE). You will need Xcode to create your game projects, write and debug your code, and build your project for the App Store. Xcode also comes bundled with an iOS simulator to test your game on virtualized iPhones and iPads on your computer.

Apple praises Xcode as "an incredibly productive environment for building amazing apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad" .

To install Xcode, search for Xcode in the AppStore, or visit http://developer.apple.com and select Developer and then Xcode.

Note

Swift is continually evolving and each new Xcode release brings changes to Swift. If you run into errors because Swift has changed, you can always use Xcode's built-in syntax update tool. Simply use Xcode's Edit | Convert to Latest Syntax option to update your code.

Xcode performs common IDE features to help you write better, faster code. If you have used IDEs in the past, then you are probably familiar with autocompletion, live error highlighting, running and debugging a project, and using a project manager pane to create and organize your files. However, any new program can seem overwhelming at first. We will walk through some common interface functions over the next few pages. I have also found tutorial videos on YouTube to be particularly helpful if you are stuck. Most common search queries result in helpful videos.

Creating our first Swift game

Do you have Xcode installed? Let's see some game code in action in the simulator!

We will start by creating a new project in Xcode. For our demo game, we will create a side-scrolling endless flyer featuring an astonishing flying penguin named Pierre. I am going to name this project Pierre Penguin Escapes the Antarctic, but feel free to name your project whatever you like. Follow these steps to create a new project in Xcode:

  1. Launch Xcode and navigate to File | New | Project.
  2. You will see a screen asking you to select a template for your new project. Select iOS | Application in the left pane, and Game in the right pane. It should look like this:

    Creating our first Swift game

  3. Once you have selected Game, click Next. The following screen asks us to enter some basic information about our project. Don't worry; we are almost at the fun bit. Fill in the Product Name field with the name of your game.
  4. Let's fill in the Team field. Do you have an active Apple developer account? If not, you can skip over the Team field for now. If you do, your Team is your developer account. Click Add Team and Xcode will open the accounts screen where you can log in. Enter your developer credentials, as shown in the following screenshot:

    Creating our first Swift game

  5. Once you're authenticated, you can close the accounts screen. Your developer account should appear in the Team dropdown.
  6. You will want to pick a meaningful Organization Name and Organization Identifier when you create your own games for publication. Your Organization Name is the name of your game development studio. For me, that is Joyful Games. By convention, your Organization Identifier should follow a reverse domain name style. I will use io.JoyfulGames since my website is JoyfulGames.io.
  7. After you filled out the name fields, be sure to select Swift for the Language, SpriteKit for Game Technology, and Universal for Devices.
  8. For now, uncheck Integrate GameplayKit, uncheck Include Unit Tests, and uncheck Include UI Tests. We will not use these features in our demo game. Here are my final project settings:

    Creating our first Swift game

  9. Click Next and you will see the final dialog box. Save your new project. Pick a location on your computer and click Next. And we are in! Xcode has pre-populated our project with a basic SpriteKit template.

Navigating our project

Now that we have created our project, you will see the project navigator on the left-hand side of Xcode. You will use the project navigator to add, remove, and rename files and generally organize your project. You might notice that Xcode has created quite a few files in our new project. We will take it slow; don't feel that you have to know what each file does yet, but feel free to explore them if you are curious:

Navigating our project

End of Section 6
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