Learn Sprite Kit for iOS Game Development

Chapter     6

Creating a Cast of Characters

Static vs. Dynamic Characters

The solution to enemy spawning thus far has been to use the update method in the SKBGameScene class to create new sprites in a repeating loop until hitting a statically defined maximum. While this works fine for viewing immediate results when adding new enemy classes, it’s not an elegant or efficient solution in the long term. You need a way of introducing characters into play in such a way that you can easily change your mind without having to change the code, thereby forcing you to rebuild the project every time you add, remove, or modify your spawning ideas. In other words, you need a dynamic “cast of characters.”

You do this by having the spawning data reside in a file ...