Getting to know Sprite Kit

Sprite Kit is a framework from Apple, meant for developing 2D games for iOS devices. It is one of the best ways to make games for iOS devices. It is easy to learn, powerful and fully supported by Apple, which makes it more reliable to use than third-party game development engines.

Sprite Kit was introduced in iOS 7 and allowed easy, fast game development; it has similarities with Cocos2d, which is a popular library for game development. If you are somewhat familiar with Cocos2d, Sprite Kit will be a breeze for you.

Sprite Kit provides various functionalities that are useful for games, such as graphics rendering, animation utilities, sound playback, a particle system, and physics simulation. In Sprite Kit, every node will have a property name and physics body, which can consist of arbitrary shapes such as rectangles, polygons, circles, paths, and so on. Sprite Kit provides a richer particle system, where any aspect can be changed by code during the animation. In Sprite Kit's particle system, you can also add custom actions to the particles created. In addition, Xcode provides built-in support for Sprite Kit so that you can create complex special effects and texture atlases directly in Xcode. This combination of framework and tools makes Sprite Kit a good choice for games and other apps that require similar kinds of animation.

Because Sprite Kit supports a rich rendering infrastructure, and handles all of the low-level work to submit drawing commands to OpenGL, you can focus your efforts on solving higher-level design problems and creating your game functionality.

As Sprite Kit is a native framework of iOS, it provides in-built support for using the particle effects, texture effects, and physics simulations. The performance of Sprite Kit is better than other third-party frameworks/gaming engines, as it is a native framework.