What this book covers

Chapter 1, Sprites and Animations, teaches you how to draw sprites in a scene, add colored sprites, and render 2D shapes using primitives. This chapter will also show you how to animate sprites, move sprites, add different kinds of actions to a sprite, and also look at the parallax effect to create a more dynamic scene.

Chapter 2, Scenes and Menus, will cover how to add scenes to the game, such as a gameplay scene, how to create buttons and labels in the scene, and how to create transitions between the scenes using various transition effects.

Chapter 3, Gestures, Touches, and the Accelerometer, will discuss various methods of user interaction, such as tapping, holding, swiping along with adding accelerometer inputs and gestures to the scene.

Chapter 4, Physics, will provide examples of how to add physics to the scene and make objects respond to physics. This chapter will also look at different body types and body properties, adding sprites to a body, applying force and impulse to a body, detecting collision responses, and building objects, such as a vehicle, by adding physics bodies together.

Chapter 5, Audio, will show you how to edit audio tracks to create music and sound effects, add the background music and audio effects to the game, add a pause and resume button to the game, and add a volume slider to control the volume of audio to the options menu.

Chapter 6, AI and A* Pathfinding, will include ways to add Artificial Intelligence to enemies in the game. This chapter will also look at creating patrolling, chasing, and projectile shooting enemies. It will cover a pathfinding to create more advanced AI logic for enemies using grids.

Chapter 7, Data Storage and Retrieval, will teach you how to save and load game progress on the device using NSUserDefault, create and access files using JSON, Plist, and XML files, for custom storage and retrieval of data.

Chapter 8, Effects, teaches you to add dynamic lighting to your game, manipulate the position and color of the light source dynamically using touch controls, and add 2D shadows to the game created by the light source. You will learn to add effects to the game using the CCEffects class of Cocos2d to create interesting effects in the game.

Chapter 9, Game Tools, provides insights to using industry standard tools, such as TexturePacker, Glyph Designer, PhysicsEditor, Particle Designer, and Sprite Illuminator, to create more visually appealing and performance-optimized games.

Chapter 10, Swift/SpriteBuilder Basics, shows you how to develop games in Apple's latest programming language, Swift. We will see the differences between Objective-C and Swift in this chapter. We will also see how to import Objective-C classes into Swift to reduce the redundancy of code. This chapter will also provide insight into using SpriteBuilder to develop more robust games.

Chapter 11, Porting to Android, will take a look at how to take your existing game developed for iOS and port it to Android. We will learn how to install the Android Xcode plugin, prepare the device for deployment, and finally run the project on an Android device.