At the core of game development is your game's code. It is the brain of your project and outside of the art, sound, and various asset developments. It is where you will spend most of your time creating and testing your game. Up until Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference WWDC14 in June of 2014, the code of choice for iOS game and app development was Objective-C. At WWDC14, a new and faster programming language, Swift, was announced and is now the recommended language for all current and future iOS games and general app creation.
As of the time of writing, you can still use Objective-C to design your games, but programmers, both, new and seasoned, will see why writing in Swift is not only easier for expressing your game's logic, but even more preformat. Keeping your game running at that critical 60 fps is dependent on fast code and logic. Engineers at Apple developed the Swift programming language from the ground up with performance and readability in mind, so this language can execute certain code iterations faster than Objective-C while also keeping code ambiguity to a minimum. Swift also uses many of the methodologies and syntaxes found in more modern languages, such as Scala, JavaScript, Ruby, and Python.
So, let's dive into the Swift language.
It's somewhat traditional when learning programming languages to begin with a Hello World example. A Hello World program is simply using your code to display or log the text Hello World. It's always been the general starting point because sometimes just getting your code environment set up and having your code executing correctly is half the battle. At least, this was more the case in older programming languages.
Swift makes this easier than ever, and without going into the structure of a Swift file (which we shall do later on and is also much easier than Objective-C and past languages), here's how you create a Hello World program:
print("Hello, World!")That's it! That is all you need to have the text Hello World appear in Xcode's debug area output.