Build iOS Games with Sprite Kit

Implementing Weapon Power-Ups with Actions

To finish out this chapter, we’ll give the player a power-up advantage to help him clear a path through the obstacles. If the player collects the power-up, the ship shoots faster for a short time. Collect more power-ups, and the timer keeps resetting to give more time. Sprite Kit’s code-block actions make this sequence of steps easy to do.

First, we need our power-up sprite texture, so drag powerup.png into the Xcode sidebar and make sure it is added to the target, as you did in Figure 7, ​Dragging and dropping files into the Xcode project​.

Next, we need to create a property that we will use to keep track of the current firing rate.