Tuesday 23 November 2010

Developing for iPhone - One Month On

I've been working with iPhone/iPad development for about a month now, and am now well into the swing of Greedy Bankers for iPhone. This post is really a little update on what I've been doing so far, with some tips for people who are also considering game development for iDevices.

Developing for iPhone

Learning Objective-C was not massively difficult, but it is a more complex (or perhaps complicated) language than C# or ActionScript, being a lot more similar to C++. A lot of iPhone development tutorials seem to focus on using XCode's Interface Builder, and avoiding programming. As a game developer, you really do need to code hands-on. So after beginning a few iPhone tutorials to get my head around the syntax, I moved on to using Cocos2D.

Cocos2D is an open-source game framework, which gives you all the things you need to be able to deal with graphics, layered scenes, and other game-specific code in an easy way. Using frameworks is something I've learnt to embrace recently, as it saves a lot of time and hassle, and often helps your game run faster (as they will be developed with efficiency in mind).