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Home > Game Development > Mobile Game Development > iOS 9 Game development Essentials
iOS 9 Game development Essentials
iOS 9 Game development Essentials

iOS 9 Game development Essentials: Design, build, and publish an iOS game from scratch using the stunning features of iOS 9

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iOS 9 Game development Essentials

Chapter 2. Structuring and Planning a Game Using iOS 9 Storyboards and Segues

Video game development has had an interesting history. It started as an offshoot of both electrical engineering and computer science. Games were a great challenge for engineers to make the most out of the limited hardware and, of course, make something fun. Today, video games and video game development are still built on those foundations of technology, math, and engineering but, for decades, have also been major players in the world of entertainment, storytelling, and media.

Be it if you are a major studio, a small team, or creating games all by yourself, planning and structuring your game projects can give you the foundation needed to save time in the development process, divide the work out to others if on a team, and of course, bring your game to life as close as possible to how you imagined it.

Starting with iOS 5, Apple took a page from the entertainment industry in how to structure and plan a project...

Model-View-Controller

Before we get into storyboards in iOS 9, it's best that we first discuss the basic flow of an iOS app and the concept of Model-View-Controller (MVC). Model-View-Controller is an architectural paradigm used in software engineering, programming, and even now in web design. We can think of the model portion of MVC as the logic or brains of an application's behavior. This logic is usually independent of the user interface and determines what to do with the app's data.

We've actually already gone over the model portion of MVC! The Swift programming language discussed in the previous chapter is that model; this is the case with its Objective-C predecessor and any other programming language used in iOS or any other game development. Your game's code controls what to do with the player, level, and enemy/goal data.

The view portion of MVC is the visual representation of the model. This of course would include the numerous visual aspects of our games...

An iOS app's lifecycle

Before we move on to working with storyboards, segues, and the foundation of our game apps, it's best we go over the overall lifecycle of an iOS app as it's important to know the entry points of our code and various objects/structures of our apps.

Insert app lifecycle imagery here before we move on to working with storyboards, segues, and the foundation of our game apps. It's best we go over the overall lifecycle of an iOS app as it's important to know the entry points of our code and various objects/structures of our apps.

An iOS app's lifecycle

Source: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/TheAppLifeCycle/TheAppLifeCycle.html

Anyone who has worked with C/C++, Java, or other languages will be familiar with the main() function. The main() function is used to designate your program's main entry point. The preceding example is how Apple designates the typical main function for apps. Essentially what this...

Storyboards and segues

Let's now finally get to working with these tools and learn the basics of structuring game apps on a broader storyboard level. As of the writing of this book, the latest version of Xcode available is version 7.0. This will be the version we shall work with, but Xcode is always updating with even a beta version available to separately test the newest features.

Visit https://developer.apple.com/xcode/ to download and read up on all that Xcode has to offer for iOS developers.

To start structuring your app using storyboards, follow these instructions:

  1. First, open Xcode in your Applications folder (or in your Dock if you placed it there for easy access).
  2. Next, click on Create a new Xcode Project.
    Storyboards and segues
  3. You will now be asked to choose a template preset.
  4. For the sake of just understanding storyboards and segues, select the Single View Application template. (Don't worry, we will be using the game template in the next chapter).
    Storyboards and segues
  5. Now we choose our project's options. Name...

Storyboards versus coding

There's no single correct way to do the design structure of your app as long as the MVC model is followed. Actually, there are programmers out there who are completely fine with just using the initial view controller and never use a single Nib or storyboard file; thus purely building their game controlled by the logic of their code and calls to the various View objects programmatically. In iOS development, there's somewhat of a design split between three main branches, hardcoding, Nibs, and storyboards. The original methodology was coding; Nibs came in later to first allow direct visual editing in Xcode and then that evolved into Storyboards, further built upon with the addition of Auto Layout.

The reason there's a split between some developers and studios on the visual structure methodology of an iOS app is because one drawback to Nibs and storyboards are their lack of portability. If you wanted to port your game to another platform, such as Android...

Summary

In this chapter, we went over a number of app project structuring and introduction topics. First, we went over the Model-View-Controller paradigm followed by all apps, game or not, and the overall lifecycle of an iOS app that follows this structuring. Next, we reviewed the entry point(s) and pathway of your code in a typical app as well as the upper-level objects used along the way, such as the Application system object, the AppDelegate class, and view controller. Last but not least, we discussed the main topic of the chapter—storyboards, segues, and instructions on how to create a simple game flow structure. From here, we can see how relatively easy and quick it can be to structure various scenes for your game and transition between them with segues. Again, note that although storyboards are recommended, they can simply start as a general guide toward the final product, which gives you, the developer, the ability to visualize your game even if in the end preferring a more...

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Description

Game development has always been a combination of programming and art, and mobile game development is no exception to this rule. The iOS platform has been both a staple in the ever-growing mobile game market, as well as a launching point for many game developers (hobby and career-wise). The features and frameworks available in iOS 9 continue to cater to the synergy of design and computer engineering, using tools that allow developers to take a game idea from concept to application in record time. Whether you are new to iOS and game development as a whole, or are an experienced programmer wanting to learn the latest features of the platform, iOS 9 Game Development Essentials will provide you with crucial insight into this widely used platform. Starting with the Swift programming language, this book gets the ball rolling with code concepts and game-centric code samples right from the get-go, giving you get a solid understanding of Apple’s cutting-edge programming language. The book takes you through iOS game development concepts and introduces the various frameworks that allow you to develop robust, reusable, and intelligent game components in both 2D and 3D game environments.

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Nov 06, 2015
Length: 224 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784399115
Vendor :
Apple
Category :
Game Development
Languages :
Swift
Concepts :
Mobile Game Development
Tools :
iOS

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Product Details

Publication date : Nov 06, 2015
Length: 224 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781784399115
Vendor :
Apple
Category :
Game Development
Languages :
Swift
Concepts :
Mobile Game Development
Tools :
iOS

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iOS 9 Game development Essentials
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
1. The Swift Programming Language Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
1. The Swift Programming Language
Hello World!
No more semicolons
Variables, constants, and primitive data types
Arrays, matrices, sets, and dictionaries
Mutable/immutable collections
Objective-C and Swift comparison
Characters and strings
Commenting in Swift
Boolean
Ints, UInts, floats, and doubles
Objects in Swift
Optionals
Tuples
Summary
2. Structuring and Planning a Game Using iOS 9 Storyboards and Segues Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Structuring and Planning a Game Using iOS 9 Storyboards and Segues
Model-View-Controller
An iOS app's lifecycle
Storyboards and segues
Storyboards versus coding
Summary
3. SpriteKit and 2D Game Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. SpriteKit and 2D Game Design
A brief history of iOS game development engines
The game loop
Tile game – SwiftSweeper
Creating our SpriteKit game
Creating our game logic
DemoBots
4. SceneKit and 3D Game Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. SceneKit and 3D Game Design
SceneKit basics and working with nodes
SpriteKit / SceneKit interactivity
Our first SceneKit scene – the Xcode template
SceneKit features introduced in iOS 9 / Xcode 7
Fox demo
Particle systems
Introducing SceneKit and SpriteKit physics
Summary
5. GameplayKit Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. GameplayKit
Entities and components
State machines
Summary
6. Exhibit the Metal in Your Game Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Exhibit the Metal in Your Game
The Apple Metal API and the graphics pipeline
What are shaders?
Why is Metal faster than OpenGL ES?
The basic Metal object/code structure
Summary
7. Publishing Our iOS Game Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Publishing Our iOS Game
The ever changing process of app submission
Submitting your game for review
Updating your game
Summary
8. The Future of iOS Game Development Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. The Future of iOS Game Development
A greater focus on functional programming
The Apple Watch
Component-based structuring
The rise of VR
Summary
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index

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Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2.2
(5 Ratings)
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3 star 40%
2 star 40%
1 star 20%
Karl Vittel Feb 12, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
because swift is not a big language as of today and it changes a lot from version to version, it is very difficult to get started and to get examples in the web. so I thought buying a few books could help.this book is atleast uptodate as of today (feb 2016)there are a number of good examples that really help to get started with severalbut its not very deep or detailed - and a lot of stuff is missing
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Benjamin Schoenecker Jan 25, 2016
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I think this book is decent. It gives kind of a drawn out introduction to Swift that basically is a beginners guide to basic swift syntax. The examples move pretty quickly through the content and don't go into a lot of detail or things like best practices. Some useful info, but more of a skimming over of all of the newer XCode game development features.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Nicholas M. Turner Sep 09, 2016
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He just skims over everything. I read some of it, but i was already disappointed he didn't say he uses swift(worse language than VB) and he has 8 pages on gameplaykit? whatever
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amazon Customer Jan 12, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
This book just regurgitates the information presented by Apple at WWDC 2015, with code snippets from Apple's freely available samples. There is no original content or thought in this book at all.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
John Gambrell Jun 01, 2016
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
Unless you are completely new to Game development and have literally no idea where to start this is a waste. And what info it did have can be found online.
Amazon Verified review Amazon

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