Swift 3 Game Development E-Book

Stephen Haney

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 246

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Swift 3 Game Development - Second Edition

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Why subscribe?

Customer Feedback

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Designing Games with Swift

Why you will love Swift

Prerequisites

What you will learn in this book

Embracing SpriteKit

Reacting to player input

Structuring your game code

Building UI/menus/levels

Integrating with Game Center

Maximizing fun

Crossing the finish line

Monetizing your work

New in Swift 3

Setting up your development environment

Introducing and installing Xcode

Creating our first Swift game

Navigating our project

Exploring the SpriteKit demo

Examining the demo code

Cleaning up

Summary

2. Sprites, Camera, Action!

Sharpening our pencils

Checkpoint 2-A

Drawing your first sprite

Building a SKSpriteNode class

Adding animation to your toolkit

Sequencing multiple animations

Recapping your first sprite

The story on positioning

Alignment with anchor points

Adding textures and game art

Downloading the free assets

More exceptional art

Drawing your first textured sprite

Adding the bee image to your project

Loading images with SKSpriteNode

Designing for retina

The ideal asset approach

Hands-on with retina in SpriteKit

Organizing your assets

Exploring Assets.xcassets

Collecting art into texture atlases

Updating our bee node to use the texture atlas

Iterating through texture atlas frames

Putting it all together

Centering the camera on a sprite

Checkpoint 2-B

Summary

3. Mix in the Physics

Laying the foundation

Following protocol

Reinventing the bee

The icy tundra

Adding the ground texture to Assets.xcassets

Adding the Ground class

Tiling a texture

Running wire to the ground

A wild penguin appears!

Renovating the GameScene class

Exploring the physics system

Dropping like flies

Solidifying the ground

Checkpoint 3-A

Exploring physics simulation mechanics

Bee meets bee

Impulse or force?

Checkpoint 3-B

Summary

4. Adding Controls

Retrofitting the Player class for flight

The Beekeeper

Updating the Player class

Moving the ground

Assigning a physics body to the player

Creating a physics body shape from a texture

Polling for device movement with Core Motion

Implementing the Core Motion code

Checkpoint 4-A

Wiring up the sprite onTap events

Implementing touchesBegan in the GameScene

Larger than life

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

Looping the ground

Checkpoint 4-B

Summary

5. Spawning Enemies, Coins, and Power-ups

Introducing the cast

Locating and adding the art assets

Adding the Power-up Star

Adding the Star class

Adding a new enemy - the Mad Fly

Adding the MadFly class

Another terror - Bats!

Adding the Bat class

Guarding the ground - adding the Blade

Adding the Blade class

Adding the coins

Creating the coin classes

Organizing the project navigator

Testing the new game objects

Checkpoint 5-A

Preparing for endless flight

Summary

6. Generating a Never-Ending World

Designing levels with the SpriteKit scene editor

Separating level data from game logic

Using custom classes in the scene editor

Encounters in endless flying

Creating our first encounter

Integrating scenes into the game

Checkpoint 6-A

Spawning endless encounters

Building more encounters

Updating the EncounterManager class

Storing metadata in SKSpriteNodeuserData property

Wiring up EncounterManager in the GameScene class

Spawning the Power-up Star at random

Turning bronze coins to gold

Checkpoint 6-B

Summary

7. Implementing Collision Events

Learning the SpriteKit collision vocabulary

Collision versus contact

Physics category masks

Using category masks in Swift

Adding contact events to our game

Setting up the physics categories

Assigning categories to game objects

The player

The ground

The Power-up Star

Enemies

Coins

Preparing GameScene for contact events

Viewing console output

Testing our contact code

Checkpoint 7-A

Player health and damage

Animations for damage and game over

The damage animation

The game over animation

Collecting coins

The Power-up Star logicterrific progress in this chapter. To download my project up to this 

Checkpoint 7-B

Summary

8. Polishing to a Shine - HUD, Parallax Backgrounds, Particles, and More

Adding a HUD

Implementing the HUD

Parallax background layers

Adding the background assets

Implementing a background class

Wiring up backgrounds in the GameScene class

Checkpoint 8-A

Harnessing SpriteKit's particle system

Adding the circle particle asset

Creating a SpriteKit particle file

Configuring the path particle settings

Adding the particle emitter to the game

Granting safety as the game starts

Checkpoint 8-B

Summary

9. Adding Menus and Sounds

Building the main menu

Creating the menu scene and menu nodes

Launching the main menu when the game starts

Wiring up the START GAME button

Adding the restart game menu

Extending the HUD

Wiring up GameScene for game over

Informing the GameScene class when the player dies

Implementing touch events for the restart menu

Checkpoint 9-A

Adding music and sound

Adding the sound assets to the game

Playing background music

Playing sound effects

Adding the coin sound effect to the Coin class

Adding the power-up and hurt sound effects to the Player class

Playing a sound when the game starts

Checkpoint 9-B

Summary

10. Standing Out in the Crowd with Advanced Features

Adding fun crates to smash open

Creating the Crate particle effects

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. Choosing a Monetization Strategy

Developing your marketing plan

When to start marketing

Marketing checklist

Leveraging crowdfunding

Pros and cons of crowdfunding

Showing display ads for revenue

The upsides to showing ads

The downsides to showing ads

Selling in-app purchases

In-app purchase strategies

A word about farming your players

Localization into foreign markets

Managing scope and completing projects

Summary

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

Creating a new leaderboard in iTunes Connect

Updating the leaderboard from the code

Adding an achievement

Creating a new achievement in iTunes Connect

Updating achievements from the code

Checkpoint 10-B

Summary

13. Ship It! Preparing for the App Store and Publication

Finalizing assets

Adding app icons

Designing the launch screen

Taking screenshots for each supported device

Finalizing iTunes Connect information

Configuring pricing

Uploading our project from Xcode

Submitting for review in iTunes Connect

Summary

Swift 3 Game Development - Second Edition

Swift 3 Game Development - Second Edition

Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: July 2015

Second edition: February 2017

Production reference: 1310117

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78712-775-3

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Credits

Author

Stephen Haney

Copy Editor

Safis Editing

Reviewer

Giordano Scalzo

Project Coordinator

Ulhas Kambali

Commissioning Editor

Ashwin Nair

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Acquisition Editor

Reshma Raman

Indexer

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Content Development Editor

Onkar Wani

Graphics

Abhinash Sahu

Technical Editor

Rashil Shah

Production Coordinator

Nilesh Mohite

About the Author

Stephen Haney has written two books on iOS game development. He began his programming journey at the age of 8 years on a dusty, ancient laptop using BASIC. He has been fascinated with building software and games ever since. Now well versed in multiple languages, he enjoys programming as a creative outlet the most. He believes that indie game development is an art form-- an amazing combination of visual, auditory, and psychological challenges-rewarding to both the player and the creator.

He enjoyed writing this book and sincerely hopes that it directly furthers your career or hobby.  

Thank you to my wonderful father, mother, and sister for their patience as I write and work, and also to my friends: Geoff, Robert, Justin, Jessie, Devin, Jason, Ben, Chris, Anna, and Shane, among others. I love you all!

About the Reviewer

Giordano Scalzo is a developer with 20 years of programming experience since the days of the ZX Spectrum.

He has worked in C++, Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, and in a ton of other languages he has forgotten the names of. After years of backend development, over the past five years, Giordano has done extensive development for iOS, releasing more than 20 apps that he wrote for clients and enterprise applications on his own.

Currently, he is a contractor in London where, through his company-Effective Code Ltd (http://effectivecode.co.uk)-he delivers code for iOS, aiming at quality and reliability.

In his spare time, when he is not crafting retro game clones for iOS, he writes and shares his thoughts on http://giordanoscalzo.com.

I’d like to thank my better half, Valentina, who lovingly supports me in everything I do: without you, none of this would have been possible. Thanks to my bright future, Mattia and Luca, for giving me lots of smiles and hugs when I needed them. Finally, my gratitude goes to my mum and my dad, who encouraged my curiosity and supported me to follow my passions, which began one day when they bought me a ZX Spectrum.

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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.

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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

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Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Chapter 1.  Designing Games with Swift

Apple's newest version of its flagship programming language, Swift 3, is the perfect choice for game developers. As it matures, Swift is realizing its opportunity to be something special, a revolutionary tool for app creators. Swift is the gateway for developers to create the next big game in the Apple ecosystem. We have only started to explore the wonderful potential of mobile gaming and Swift is the modernization we need for our toolset. Swift is fast, safe, current, and attractive to developers coming from other languages. Whether you are new to the Apple world, or a seasoned veteran of Objective-C, I think you will enjoy making games with Swift.

Apple's website states the following:

"Swift is a successor to the C and Objective-C languages."

My goal in this book is to guide you step-by-step through the creation of a 2D game for iPhones and iPads. We will start with installing the necessary software, working through each layer of game development, ultimately publishing our new game to the App Store.

We will also have some fun along the way! We aim to create an endless flyer game featuring a magnificent flying penguin named Pierre. What is an endless flyer? Picture hit games like iCopter, Flappy Bird, Whale Trail, Jetpack Joyride, and many more-the list is quite long.

Endless flyer games are popular on the App Store and the genre necessitates that we cover many reusable components of 2D game design. I will show you how to modify our mechanics to create many different game styles. My hope is that our demo project will serve as a template for your own creative works. Before you know it, you will be publishing your own game ideas using the techniques we explore together.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Why you will love SwiftWhat you will learn in this bookNew in Swift 3Setting up your development environmentCreating your first Swift game

Why you will love Swift

Swift, as a modern programming language, benefits from the collective experience of the programming community; it combines the best parts of other languages and avoids poor design decisions. Here are a few of my favorite Swift features:

Beautiful syntax: Swift's syntax is modern and approachable, regardless of your existing programming experience. Apple have balanced syntax with structure to make Swift concise and readable.Interoperability: Swift can plug directly into your existing projects and run side by side with your Objective-C code.Strong typing: Swift is a strongly typed language. This means the compiler will catch more bugs at compile time, instead of when your users are playing your game! 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. While this may seem rigid if you are coming from a weakly typed language, the added structure results in safer, more reliable code.Smart type inference: To make things easier, type inference will automatically detect the types of your variables and constants based upon their initial value. You do not need to explicitly declare a type for your variables. Swift is smart enough to infer variable types in most expressions.Automatic memory management: As the Apple Swift developer guide states, "memory management just works in Swift". Swift uses a method called Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to manage your game's memory usage. Besides a few edge cases, you can rely on Swift to safely clean up and turn off the lights.An even playing field: One of my favorite things about Swift is how quickly the language is gaining mainstream adoption. We are all learning and growing together and there is a tremendous opportunity to break new ground.Open source: From version 2.2 onwards, Apple made Swift open source, curating it through the website www.swift.org, and launched a package manager with Swift 3. This is a welcome change, as it fosters greater community involvement and a larger ecosystem of third-party tools and add-ons. Eventually, we should see Swift migrate to new platforms.

Prerequisites

I will try to make this text easy to understand for all skill levels:

I will assume you are brand new to Swift as a languageThis book requires no prior game development experience, though it will helpI will assume you have a fundamental understanding of common programming concepts

What you will learn in this book

By the end of this book, you will be capable of creating and publishing your own iOS games. You will know how to combine the techniques we learned to create your own style of game and you will be well prepared to dive into more advanced topics with a solid foundation in 2D game design.

Embracing SpriteKit

SpriteKit is Apple's 2D game development framework and your main tool for iOS game design. SpriteKit will handle the mechanics of our graphics rendering, physics, and sound playback. As far as game development frameworks go, SpriteKit is a terrific choice. It is built and supported by Apple and thus integrates perfectly with Xcode and iOS. You will learn to be highly proficient with SpriteKit as we will be using it exclusively in our demo game.

We will learn to use SpriteKit to power the mechanics of our game in the following ways:

Animating our player, enemies, and power-upsPainting and moving side-scrolling environmentsPlaying sounds and musicApplying physics such as gravity and impulses for movementHandling collisions between game objects

Reacting to player input

The control schemes in mobile games must be inventive. Mobile hardware forces us to simulate traditional controller inputs, such as directional pads and multiple buttons, on the screen. This takes up valuable visible area and provides less precision and feedback than with physical devices. Many games operate with only a single input method: a single tap anywhere on the screen. We will learn how to make the best of mobile input and explore new forms of control by sensing device motion and tilt.

Structuring your game code

It is important to write well-structured code that is easy to re-use and modify as your game design inevitably changes. You will often find mechanical improvements as you develop and test your games and you will thank yourself for a clean working environment. Though there are many ways to approach this topic, we will explore some best practices to build an organized system with classes, protocols, inheritance, and composition.

Building UI/menus/levels

We will learn to switch between scenes in our game with a menu screen. We will cover the basics of user experience design and menu layout as we build our demo game.

Integrating with Game Center

Game Center is Apple's built-in social gaming network. Your game can tie into Game Center to store and share high scores and achievements. We will learn how to register for Game Center, tie it into our code, and create a fun achievement system.

Maximizing fun

If you are like me, you will have dozens of ideas for games floating around your head. Ideas come easily, but designing fun gameplay is difficult! It is common to find that your ideas need gameplay enhancements once you see your design in action. We will look at how to avoid dead-ends and see your project through to the finish line. Plus, I will share my tips and tricks to ensure your game will bring joy to your players.

Crossing the finish line

Creating a game is an experience you will treasure. Sharing your hard work will only sweeten the satisfaction. Once our game is polished and ready for public consumption, we will navigate the App Store submission process together. You will end up feeling confident in your ability to create games with Swift and bring them to market in the App Store.

Monetizing your work

Game development is a fun and rewarding process, even without compensation, but the potential exists to start a career, or side job, selling games on the App Store. Successfully promoting and marketing your game is an important task. I will outline your options and start you down the path to monetization.

New in Swift 3

The biggest feature in Swift 3 is syntax compatibility and stability. Apple is trying to refine its young, shifting language into its final foundational shape. Each successive update of Swift has introduced breaking syntax changes that made older code incompatible with the newest version of Swift; this is very inconvenient for developers. Going forward, Swift 3 aims to reach maturity and maintain source compatibility with future releases of the language. Swift 3 also features the following:

A package manager that will help grow the ecosystemA more consistent, readable API and API guidelines that often result in less code for the same resultImproved tooling and bug fixes in the IDE, XcodeMany small syntax improvements in consistency and clarity

Swift has already made tremendous steps forward as a powerful, young language. Now Apple is working on polishing Swift into a mature, production-ready tool. The overall developer experience improves with Swift 3.