SpriteKit on Xamarin.iOS: fun without compromise

TL;DR: get the source of the game on github.

With the release of iOS7, and same day support in Xamarin.iOS, I'm spending all my free time playing with the new APIs. I particularly love iBeacon and Background Fetch. Next on my list was SpriteKit.

SpriteKit is a 2D game engine, not unlike cocos2d at all. We'll see next that it's going from one platform to another is very simple.

 I'm not a game developer, but I have some experience with cocos2d as I co-wrote (with Miguel) the cocos2d bindings for Xamarin.iOS. At that time, to test the binding, I ported a sample platform jumper game from obj-c cocos2d to c#. And I again ported the same game to SpriteKit. Here are my findings about the experience:

The Pros

• you can almost to a line by line port between cocos2d and SpriteKit, once you figure out the basics
• less boilerplate. Or even no boilerplate at all with SpriteKit. a SKView is a UIView, and is ready to serve as soon as you PresentScene() it. Compare that with the directors you have to put in place before writing a line of game logic in cocos2d. It's a win.
• less leaky abstractions. I haven't compared performances, but SpriteKit doesn't expose stuffs like BatchNodes, so it's one stuff you don't have to bother about.
• SKAction is a nice addition for objects you don't want to animate yourself in your Update() loop (they're executed just after Update(), and before physics simulation)

The Cons

• I found myself looking for BitmapFonts. It seems like a standard in game development, but missing from SpriteKit (or I haven't found it). I'm quite confident that's a stuff we'll see in an upcoming new version.

The Rest

• As the original game, this port doesn't leverage any Physics engine, so I have nothing to say about SKPhysics* stuffs. From the API, it looks very similar to what Chipmunk offer.

So it was a very pleasant port, at the end taking even less lines of code than the original port, and only 2 hours to write. If you want to start developing games, going for SpriteKit on Xamarin.iOS is really a no brainer. No boilerplate, no gotchas, just fun.

The Code

The code is on github, it's MIT/X11 so do whatever you want with it. The graphics are borrowed from the original game, read the LICENSE about their usage.