First Thing First, Learn What Is Sprite Kit? And How its Work?
As one example of this, the primary Apple documentation for Sprite Kit, the Sprite Kit programming guide that you can get at the developer center. Now, this is great. It's really well-written. It's full of useful info. You'll find it tremendously valuable as you build your games. But, if you are new or reasonably new to game development, this begins in the wrong place for you. The first page immediately begins with diagrams about multiple stages of the game rendering loop, and phrases about creating texture atlases. And this is all true, it's all perfectly accurate. It's just not that helpful if you don't know what rendering loops or texture atlases are.
And why you're supposed to care about this. And here's the thing. If you had experience in another game engine, that page would make a lot of sense. But when you aren't coming from that background, beginning with that kind of content can kind of feel like you've skipped and episode or two of a TV season you were trying to watch. You thought you were starting with episode one but in that first scene everybody's already talking about characters and events and you don't know who anybody is yet. Alright, torturous analogy over. Instead, here's how we're going to do this. I will cover every single concept here, including the aforementioned rendering loops and texture atlases, but to begin with, we shall temporarily ignore almost everything and focus just on these two.
Scenes and sprites. The two most important new concepts, objects, ideas in Sprite Kit game development. Because while you do get all this new functionality, all these great abilities, you might not need everything. And it certainly doesn't come first. Not all games need physics, or collision detection, or particles systems, but you will always use scenes and sprites. So we begin there, and they will naturally bring all the other stuff into the picture, as we need it, piece by logical piece. So we're now down to just two things to begin with. And, despite the name Sprite Kit, the fundamental building block of a Sprite Kit game, the thing we need to cover first is not a sprite, it's a scene.
Learning Sprite Kit
Sprite Kit brings a new vocabulary to iOS development. There's a lot of extra terminology and concepts. If you've read an article, or listened to anybody talk about Sprite Kit, in the first five minutes, you'd have heard about rendering loops, particle systems, animation infrastructure, scenes, textures, collision detection, sprites, nodes, actions, frames, coordinate systems, physics worlds and physics bodies, texture atlases, gravity, restitution, yada, yada, yada, yada. There's a lot of stuff. And if you are new to game development, this all probably sounds quite cool, and simultaneously a little off-putting and unhelpful, because it's not clear where you're supposed to begin.As one example of this, the primary Apple documentation for Sprite Kit, the Sprite Kit programming guide that you can get at the developer center. Now, this is great. It's really well-written. It's full of useful info. You'll find it tremendously valuable as you build your games. But, if you are new or reasonably new to game development, this begins in the wrong place for you. The first page immediately begins with diagrams about multiple stages of the game rendering loop, and phrases about creating texture atlases. And this is all true, it's all perfectly accurate. It's just not that helpful if you don't know what rendering loops or texture atlases are.
And why you're supposed to care about this. And here's the thing. If you had experience in another game engine, that page would make a lot of sense. But when you aren't coming from that background, beginning with that kind of content can kind of feel like you've skipped and episode or two of a TV season you were trying to watch. You thought you were starting with episode one but in that first scene everybody's already talking about characters and events and you don't know who anybody is yet. Alright, torturous analogy over. Instead, here's how we're going to do this. I will cover every single concept here, including the aforementioned rendering loops and texture atlases, but to begin with, we shall temporarily ignore almost everything and focus just on these two.
Scenes and sprites. The two most important new concepts, objects, ideas in Sprite Kit game development. Because while you do get all this new functionality, all these great abilities, you might not need everything. And it certainly doesn't come first. Not all games need physics, or collision detection, or particles systems, but you will always use scenes and sprites. So we begin there, and they will naturally bring all the other stuff into the picture, as we need it, piece by logical piece. So we're now down to just two things to begin with. And, despite the name Sprite Kit, the fundamental building block of a Sprite Kit game, the thing we need to cover first is not a sprite, it's a scene.
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