iOS Games Changes
Surprisingly, one of the biggest sets of changes this year were related to iOS and OS X games!
The most exciting change for me was a brand new framework called GameplayKit. This contains a number of really cool and helpful things for game development:
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Entity/Component Support: The "easiest" thing to do when you get started with SpriteKit is to use inheritance for your game objects, but this can lead to problems as your game gets more complicated. It's better to move to an entity/component system, but getting this working can be time consuming and tricky. With the new Entity/Component System support in GameplayKit, this will be much easier for developers to migrate to in the future.
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State Machines: Almost every game needs a state machine, and GameplayKit provides a robust implementation to build upon. I look forward to replacing my bare bones state machines with these!
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AI Support: GameplayKit also provides algorithms to more easily develop AI in your games, such as a Minmax algorithm, pathfinding, rule systems, and more. I can't wait to dig into some of this stuff!
I never would have imagined we'd get a framework like this, and I think this puts a whole new level of games within the reach of the beginner game developer.
In addition to this, there also appears to be some nice improvements to the Sprite Kit editor that reminds me of Adobe Flash - I look forward to checking that out more!
Where To Go From Here?
That's my 2c of the highlights of this year's goodies as it relates to iOS and watchOS developers. We'll be posting a bunch more articles, tutorials, books, and video tutorials about this in the coming weeks :]
I'm curious to hear what you thought about everything - what are you most excited about?
And please don't say Apple Music! ;]
