The title is very descriptive, I want to start developing games for the iphone and don't know where to start.
I would like to know what tools are available for this.
Should I start with a prebuilt game sdk?
Should I develop in C, C++ or Objective-C ?
thanks in advance.
Cocos2D is popular, and pretty simple/well thought out.
There are a handful of tools out there that simplify game development on the iPhone. Three that come to mind: Cocos2D, Box2D and Chipmunk.
Corona SDK is also a fantastic way to go if you want a cross platform game. You do all of your dev in Lua and can deploy to iOS as well as Android devices.
It also comes with Box2D physics built in.
Related
I have decided to use the game engine Unity to develop my game for iPhone. But I need to use some functions built into the iOS SDK.
If I choose to develop using Unity, can I still use functions from the standard iOS SDK? Like functions to access a url, etc...
When you compile a Unity project for iOS it takes your C# or JavaScript code and AOT compiles it to a native dll. It then creates an xcode project which loads that dll. You can add native objectiveC, or C/C++ functions to this project and expose them for calling from the Unity engine.
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Plugins.html
Unity also has built-in methods for accessing URLs.
I don't know how the Unity SDK is built, but if it's a static Objective-C library then you can access iOS SDK functions without any problems. If its a script engine where you develop your scripts outside the IDE then you may not access iOS function.
Have you checked other engines/sdk's for your game development? I know that Cocos2D is well documented and I know for sure that you can call iOS methods.
Good luck!
I used both unity3d and corona which are very good at their field, and yes you can use all standart SDK over them, sometimes you need to do tricks though (which is quite a pain). If you are developing a 3d game and familiar with NVIDIA PhysX engine go for unity, it gives you nice features. But if you are clueless about collasions/rigidbodies/ragdolls etc you would have a hard time for sure.
As for 2d application development since I don't like Objective-C I prefer corona which you code in lua (easy to learn and use). You can use most of the IOS SDK in it without any problem.
I really reccomend you starting with Unity, it is the best engine I have ever used (I have used a ton of bad engines).
Unity is the best place to start and to stay. Coding, graphics and everything is simple to manage in this engine.
Unity is specially 3d but you can also build 2d games, some examples are Zombieville and OMG Pirates (very succesfull games on the appstore).
I would like to create arcade game (cartoon style). I need framework/technology to create one code and use it on website and iPhone in same way. Is it possible?
Two possibilities:
Unity 3D (needs a plugin on the web)
HTML5 + Canvas (via mobile Safari on the iPhone)
The very popular cocos2d framework is now available in a JavaScript/HTML flavor. The press release has more specific information:
The first joint release of the cocos2d family
cocos2d is free and heavily used. There are numerous tutorials on the iPhone variant that are somewhat adaptable to the -x variant. One, very popular iOS tutorial site Ray Wenderlich, has lots of great information to get started.
There is active discussion and work being done with cocos2d to make one codebase work across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and HTML.
Looking for games/physics engines to use for mobile game development.
iPhone there is
Cocos2D
Android I've found
RokonAndroid
Just wondering if there are any others (better ones) that anyone knows of? Or any that are more cross-compatible?
Thanks
Tom
AndEngine by the anddev.org team..its alpha with no binary release..you will have to build from source..
AndEngine.org I believe
I used cocos2D-android and andengine. Andengine is much better. Best perfomance and almost without errors.
I haven't actually coded with either of these yet, but I did get the Bullet engine to compile with the NDK a few months ago. I forget what was involved off the top of my head (I can edit this post if needed), but I remember it was a bit involved and took me a couple days to solve.
Box2D port for Android
Bullet port for Android
Tom - not sure if it's better or not, but Gideros Studio may answer your needs. It's a cross-platform mobile development environment with physics, in-app purchase, Gamecenter, Storekit, hardware, as well as tweening, particle engine, and many 3rd party IDEs like physics editor, sprite helper and level editors.
It also supports native code (plugins), meaning if you have a library in C, C++, Objective C or Java, you ca integrate it next to Lua, the programming language Gideros Studio is based on. Moroever Gideros Studio IDE uses over-the-air (Wi-Fi) testing, so it's possible to test the application instantly on a real hardware.
It uses Box2D as a backend for physics.
I think nowadays your best choice is LibGDX. It is a cross-platform game engine, for Android, iOS, desktop and others, has a really active community, is still actively developed and has Box2D and Bullet physics engines integrated.
The framework is really great and there have been really successful games using this engine, even on Steam.
I have an iPhone and am getting the Droid and was wondering if blender games can run on either of them. I have already made a game and want to be able to use it on my phone.
****UPDATE****
I was wrong, just recently android support has been added but it's brand spanking new so just know that android support would be considered beta quality if that, perhaps even alpha.
I can't believe no one has given this answer:
http://code.google.com/p/gamekit/
Supports the logic bricks/python scripts etc so basically you can just load up your packaged blend file and you're good to go.
there is actually a book on how to integrate blender into a iphone game development workflow. it uses sio2 for the game engine on the iphone. it might be worth to give it a shot.
After learning more about how monotouch works, I believe I know the answer to this anyway, but can you use the cocos2d-iphone framework with monotouch? I believe most likely this will be a 'no', because cocos2d is an an objective c library and there would most probably have to be some sort of .net port for this to be achieved? is that so?
I haven't done any monotouch dev as yet, but a little objective c development with cocos2d and am quite fond of the framework, and was hoping to avoid, as I'm quite new to game dev, steeping into the dark realm of straight opengl programming via the openTK interface supported by monotouch.
I have also started a community wiki here for people to share game development options on monotouch which should help us all with this emerging framework.
Cocos2D is being ported to MonoTouch:
http://github.com/city41/cocosnet
Update:
There are two options, you can use the Cocos2D binding on MonoTouch, using the bindings as published here:
https://github.com/mono/monotouch-bindings/tree/master/cocos2d
Or you can use Cocos2D ported to XNA:
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/archives/1801
It seems CocosNet has gone untouched for some time now[a]... Is it still being developed or should you go with Objective C if you want to use Cocos2D?
[a] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1251007
I don't have any experience with MonoTouch, but you might want to see if you can get Farseer Physics working with MonoTouch. Farseer is based on Box2D, which is also a component of Cocos2d.
Good news is that the c++ version, cocos2d-x, has been ported to run on XNA for Windows Phone7. This should make it also able to run on Monotouch. I was very impressed with MonoTouch but for cocos2D I'd be inclined to go with straight cocos2d-x unless you desperately want to program in C#.
you can find an XNA version of cocos2d at https://github.com/Cocos2DXNA/cocos2d-xna. This works on MonoTouch, MonoDroid, Windows, Mac, Ouya, Xbox. It even has a high performance box2d implementation that runs as fast as the C++ box2d (at 60 fps, except for the AddPair test).
cocos2dxna.codeplex.com for our forums
www.cocos2dxna.com for the web site that we recently started
nuget.cocos2dxna.com/nuget for the nuget repository
www.facebook.com/Cocos2DXNA for our facebook page