Giveaway: Sparrow Framework Beginner's Guide

Daniel Sperl on July 22, 2014

While Starling was already granted the honor of being the topic of two books, it took a little longer for our first-born framework, Sparrow. But the wait is over: Packt Publishing recently launched a wonderful guide to Sparrow, written by the experienced Sparrow developer Johannes Stein!

The book is called Sparrow iOS Game Framework: Beginner’s Guide and shows you how to create a complete strategy game with all the required steps, complete from installing Xcode to bringing the game into the App Store. Along the way, you learn all the important concepts of Sparrow.

What you will learn from this book

Here is a summary of the topics that are covered:

  • Create display objects
  • Learn how to render them on the screen
  • Animate objects in the game world
  • Develop your game for multiple devices such as the iPhone and the iPad
  • Organize it into scenes and classes and build upon the iOS directory structure
  • Create and design the user interface utilizing the Sparrow API
  • Apply basic artificial intelligence to enemy objects to enhance the difficulty level
  • Add finishing touches to your game with music and sound effects

As technical reviewer, I followed the development of the book closely. I really enjoyed reading through the book, since Johannes found just the right balance between theory and practice. The book takes you closely by the hand as you tackle each challenge of the development phase. Before you know it, you’ve got a complete game you can polish and release to the store!

Johannes, thanks a lot for all your efforts! I’m sure both beginners and experienced Sparrow developers will enjoy reading this book and will learn interesting tricks that will make them better game developers.

Thanks also goes to Packt Publishing for initiating this whole project!

Win a Free Copy!

I’m happy to announce a special goody for the readers of our blog. We’re giving away one free copy of the book in its paperback version!

All you have to do is leave a comment below. Use the comment for whatever you want to tell us — feedback about Sparrow in general, the chapter you’d be most interested in reading, or what you expect from the future.

You’ve got time until July 27th, 2014. When the time is over, “arc4random” will pick the happy winner, who will be contacted via e-mail (so be sure to log in with a real e-mail address).

Good luck, everyone! And don’t forget to add your comment right away!

Update 2014/07/28: The winner was chosen!

First of all, thanks a lot to all who entered the contest! It’s great to see that there’s so much interest for the book!

And the lucky winner is … Hripoll! You will get an e-mail shortly with the information about how to claim your prize. Have fun with the book!

To all the others: we’ll try to make similar giveaways in the future, promised! Be sure to follow our Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus feeds to stay in touch.