Apple Game Frameworks and Technologies

Animation in SpriteKit

Have you ever made one of those little flip-books that when you thumb through the pages, your drawings come to life? With a flip-book, you can string together a series of static images that appear to move as you flip through them, sort of like a filmstrip animation, like so:

Working with animation in SpriteKit isn’t much different than making a flip-book: you grab a handful of images known as textures, and you cycle through them one by one. The more textures you use, the smoother the animation; however, too many textures can quickly overload device resources, making the animation choppy and slow. The trick is to strike ...