Last Thursday I had the privilege to speak about Sprite Kit at the Minnesota CocoaHeads chapter. The turnout was great as iOS developers are excited about the potential of Sprite Kit.

Sprite Kit is a new 2D game engine API available in iOS 7. It combines a 2D sprite API over OPEN GL, as well as a 2D physics engine and API. Unlike most 3rd party game engines, it also integrates well with all of iOS’s other API’s, including UIKit and Storyboards.

To demonstrate building a simple game in Sprite Kit, I built a tutorial style demo. This demo is available on GitHub. The demo consists of 3 parts, each part building off of the one before. Demo 3 runs the final version of the “game”, which consists of trying to hit the Zombie with the Ball three times. Admittedly, it is not a very fun or challenging game :-) However, it should help you see the basics of moving sprites around the screen, interacting with them, and letting them interact with each other (collisions). The demos are designed to run on the iPad simulator in XCode.

Demo 1 demonstrates:

• Creating a sprite from a texture atlas
• Basic animations and sequences
• Scene Transitions
• Texture Atlases
• Basic physics bodies properties

Demo 2 demonstrates:

• Accepting user input
• Controlling a physics body from user input
• Interacting with labels
• Collision and contact handling with bit masks

Demo 3 demonstrates:

• Navigating with Storyboard integrating
• Integrating with UIKit