Question

SpriteKit is Apple’s built in 2D Gaming API, but there are others out there. What other libraries exist for developing 2D games? What are the advantages or disadvantages with using SpriteKit vs these other libraries?

Answer 1

There are different many libraries are found to develop 2D Gaming. This development can be made in different languages like C, C++ etc and are very informative and mostly use for reducing the complexities. There are also libraries other than SpriteKit which are used for this development those are like SDL for the C and SFML for the C++ and sometimes Allegro and even OpenGL as the second Preference. Cocos2Dx is also a C++ based framework for mobile game development. For graphics the most preferable library which is big but super powerful is  OGRE3d.

Advantages of SpriteKit vs other libraries:

• There is no need to import any external libraries or having any need to download other external dependencies into the program. We can easily use other iOS APIs like iAd, In-App Purchases, etc. without depending on any extra plugins that are used to add some extra features to the program.
• If you already aware or worked ever on Swift and iOS development, you can easily be comfortable and reliable to use SpriteKit.
• Since it is Apple’s products so we can use the same SpriteKit code to make our game to be feasible and easy to use without any hitch on iOS,macOS, and tvOS.
• Apple provides all of SpriteKit’s functionality free of cost. Hence it can easily and precisely use to develop our games while other libraries have no free version for user's use.

Disadvantages of SpriteKit vs other libraries:

• Along with many features, SpriteKit works only for the system which comes later on iOS 7.
• SpriteKit has no features like Shaders and Cameras.
• It has fewer properties in comparison to some latest technology like Cocos2Dx.