Sprite Kit, GLKit, and Scene Kit: How Apple is shaping game development
Buried in the avalanche of publicity surrounding the release of iOS 7 was the introduction of a new framework, called Sprite Kit, designed to help developers more easily and efficiently build 2D games.
The news barely registered in the mainstream press, but it made a big splash at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where many enthusiastic programmers attended a few sessions covering it.
Given the seemingly endless stream of games that land in the App Store, Sprite Kit may seem at first glance to be little more than a curiosity—one of many new features to debut in a new operating system release. In reality, though, it’s part of a long-running strategy that Apple has developed to make iOS a great place for gamers and developers.
With great power comes great complexity
Building a computer game has never been an easy task. All but the most trivial titles require considerable programming effort in areas ranging from graphics to sound to user interface. In the old days, this meant taking advantage of every trick in the book to squeeze performance out of computer architectures that were, by today’s standards, primitive. With GPUs nowhere to be seen until the mid-1990s, developers had to build their own tools almost from scratch.
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