According to the Game Developer Research 2009-2010 Survey, the Wii is the big loser dropping from 42 to 30 percent of console developers.   The iPhone and iPod touch developer numbers more than double those on Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.  This bodes well for the iPad which will allow for more complex games.

The fact of the matter is that the iPhone 3GS has tremendous graphical power.  The controls are intuitive, even though there’s no available gamepad (yet…), and there are first class tools and libraries available at little or no cost.  The more traditional platforms will need to let independent developers in at a low cost, or they will continue to lose support.

You can read more about the survey and it’s results  on Gamasutra here: State of Game Development Survey Reveals iPhone Support Surge, Wii Lull

If you are looking to get started with iPhone game development, and are looking to go the Objective-C route you should check out these excellent iPhone game programming tutorials.

You can also check out some open source iPhone game engines, and commercial iPhone game engines.

Please post any comments below, thanks!

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

At some point you will need to compile your app on the official iPhone SDK running on the Mac OS X if your goal is to get your app in to Apple’s iPhone app store.  Now, I know there is the obvious "hackintosh" solution, but I won’t get into that, not only is it possibly illegal, but I’ve seen someone try it… and it was a major continuous hassle, every update of the OS and SDK cost them valuable hours, when they could  just get a sub-$600 Mac Mini and avoid all hassles.  That being said there are ways to develop your iPhone app in windows.

I am limiting those shown here to those from which apps already available in the store have been created with, and some that appear to be exceptionally well done.

These two Windows alternatives are specifically for entertainment apps, and will allow you to (when the projects are loaded on a mac) compile directly into code usable on the iPhone.  Both of these game development engines offer a free trial.

1) Unity 3D – Game development engine and editor that utilizes Boo and C# and the editor works on both Windows and Mac.

2) Stonetrip S3D – Game develop engine and editor utilizing LUA, the editor runs within Windows.

Both these solutions can compile to code that is native to the iPhone and many apps available in the app store have been created using them.

These solutions allow you to create apps using web technologies (HTML/CSS/Javascript) and then run them through an Objective-C framework that responds to actions within a UIWebView, thus allowing you to access native functionality on the iPhone.  These frameworks are free.

3) Appcelerator Titanium – This is probably the most complete of these development platforms at this stage (other than the above game engines), and extensive support is provided.

4) Genuitec MobiOne – This is an interface designer that uses the Phonegap framework to deliver native functionality.  It only runs on windows.

There are a couple of other solutions that were either in testing, required payment without any form of trial (or in some cases even screenshots), or just aren’t out yet.  The most promising of those solutions are  Flash CS5 (which supposedly may let you bypass the Mac altogether), and the Dragonfire SDK (you can visit their site, and sign up for the dragonfire beta.).

Best of luck, if you know of any other alternatives that enable iPhone Development on Windows then please list them below.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

The game is Alchemist (iTunes link), and the original article can be found here.

The developers state that even though they have never developed a mobile game, that they were able to make a high quality app that is almost indistinguishable from a native app in actual use. That being said there were a few negatives:

• Performance is not as good as a native app so they don’t suggest using frame heavy engines, and Papervision 3D (a popular 3D graphics engine for the Flash platform) was unusable.
• The game will need some optimization to run on the iPhone, don’t expect a web game to run straight out.
• No way to integrate social gaming support used in native apps.
• No support for in app purchases.

Despite these negatives the developers felt like the whole experience was “a breeze from start to finish”, and will allow anyone with Photoshop, and basic Flash knowledge to build a high quality app.

I look forward to playing with this thing.. I have to admit Flash game development is pretty fun, it’s nice to see results so quickly… need to get my Photoshop abilities up to snuff though

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

You can read more about the update on the Cocos2D blog here along with how to upgrade your game for use with this release:
Cocos2D for iPhone 0.9.0 Beta Update Released

The update can be downloaded here:
http://cocos2d-iphone.googlecode.com/files/cocos2d-iphone-0.9.0-beta.tar.gz

If you haven’t checked out Cocos2D before and are looking for a free 2D game engine for the iPhone be sure to check out my listings of Cocos2D Resources and Open Source Cocos2D Games.

Thanks.
 

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

The Unity Indie edition has now been completely removed.  This was the lower priced version of Unity that required you to show a splash screen and had several features removed that existed in the much more expensive Unity Pro version.  Unity Indie is renamed just plain Unity which is now free. 

The Unity iPhone Basic edition still costs $399.. this is the bare minimum of what you need to develop games with Unity, run them on the iPhone and get them into the app store.  That being said this is still a great thing for iPhone developers.  The reason? Unity no longer requires you to apply to download the iPhone edition of Unity, but rather offers a direct download to a 30 day trial for iPhone users (internet communists you need not worry.. these Unity links are not affiliate links so you can d/l).   Since you can also get a feel for the engine completely free of charge since you have an unlimited time to use the editor, and can run games on your desktop computer is also great just in case you end up realizing it’s not for you, you can find the download for "Unity" the new free version of Unity Indie here for mac.

All in all, this is a great thing… that is unless you owned Unity Indie in which case I would probably be a bit upset although they are offering Unity Indie owners a discount on upgrading to Unity Pro.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.

So what does this mean?  Will this change anything?

For those who already develop with Flash his is a very significant development, you can see on the Adobe page linked above how ecstatic some developers are, they seem to feel as though they have found the holy grail.  I have converted Flash projects to the iPhone platform, and it’s a cumbersome task, but creating simple applications visually in the Flash environment is not difficult at all.  There will no doubt be a flood of simplistic 2D games created by graphics artists with little programming knowledge.

For more sophisticated 3D games, which seem to be becoming more and more commonplace in the app store, the addition of Flash is probably not as meaningful even if there is more advanced support for 3D graphics in Flash CS5 as there are already wysiwyg 3D gaming solutions such as Stonetrip and Unity 3D.

For simplistic non-gaming apps Flash may be a solution for some, but I really can’t see it being too significant, while there are numerous Adobe Air apps available, Adobe Air has never really gained significant market share.  Cross-platform compatibility may mean even less as Apple dominates in mobile application sales.

For more sophisticated apps we will need to wait and see what capabilities of the iPhone are accessible, but it looks like Cocoa Touch and Objective-C will remain dominant in that regard.

Overall, I’d say this could be a very significant development for artists and programmers for which Flash is already part of their work flow, dependant on when Flash CS5 is actually released.  For the rest of us developers this doesn’t really mean anything at this stage, but once released I will be using whatever development environment allows me to release the best products as fast as possible.  I had the feeling something would come out like this awhile ago so I went through the excellent Actionscript 3.0 Game Programming University book which was a fun, and easy way to become acquainted with Flash development.

©2010 iPhone iOS 4 iPad SDK Development Tutorials, Programming Tips, News. All Rights Reserved.