Jan
21
2009

iPhone Game Development Stuff

This entry’s title is pretty awful, but it’s better than the original title I gave it: “Stuff!”

It’s been a while since I’ve just written a generic sort of site entry, but this seemed like a fantastic time to do just that. First, I want to thank everyone for all the awesome responses I got on the site, IRC, Twitter, and other mediums to my last entry. That was actually intended to be a useful piece to serve as advice to people looking to get into the game industry but I got carried away with my personal history as I started writing it and just rode that inspiration. I’ll write up a proper piece on general advice on how to get into the game industry at some point in the future.

I’m still plugging away on my iPhone project on a daily (or near-daily) basis. I’m having a bit of trouble actually getting to work on the game as a result of deficiencies of the engine I’m using. If the engine I’m using doesn’t provide an abundance of tools and scripts for game development then I feel compelled to add in some of the features that I’m certain I will need at some point in my game’s development so, at this point, that endeavor is occupying the entirety of my development time. One of the things which interested me the most about the Oolong Engine was how it appeared to offer an abundance of features while still allowing a lot of room for a developer to customize his/her use of the engine. At this point I’m convinced that while the engine does have a solid feature set, there is nothing that really ties one aspect of the engine together with the rest; for instance, being that it’s an engine for a touch screen-based platform I would have expected somewhat rigorous support for touch-screen input and picking within a 2D/3D scene. But alas, no such thing seems to exist. It does appear to be under heavy development but given the amount of development I do in a given day at work I like the time I spend with my side-projects to be as focused on core game design and game programming as possible.

That said, I do absolutely love not only my MacBook but also OS X and the development environment that the iPhone SDK and xcode provide. While the IDE is nowhere near the level of polish present in Microsoft Visual Studio, it’s still a tremendously useful and functional programming environment. I’m also continually impressed by the capabilities and ease of development for the iPhone/iPod Touch as a platform. It’s been a fascinating change from PC development and my XNA projects (which, C# aside, is a very PC-like platform).

I’m so impressed by the iPhone/iPod Touch as a gaming platform that I’m seriously considering putting some (or all, depending on the success or lack thereof) of the money from my first game towards an Unity 3D and iPhone license. Granted, I have absolutely no idea when my first game will hit the App Store (or even what that game will be), but I can dream. Everything I’ve seen from Unity has me endlessly impressed and I’d absolutely love to get a license for it at some point but it is, right now, a bit out of my price range. Especially given the impulse purchase of the MacBook. If anyone has used Unity for either Mac or the iPhone I’d love to hear some impressions. I also noticed that GarageGames has released a SKU of their Torque Game Engine for the iPhone; the license seems to be more expensive than their past engine releases though, which is kind of confusing. I always thought of GarageGames as offering low-priced alternatives to indies and the price point of iTGE is only $100 less than the indie license of Unity 3D along with its iPhone publishing license. And, from what I’ve seen, Unity seems to be a far more capable and thorough toolset.

Speaking of such things, is anyone doing the Global Game Jam at the end of the month? I’m still figuring out whether I’m going to head to the Detroit chapter of the thing.

Finally, since I don’t believe I’ve thrown out a plug for these guys yet, Idle Thumbs is the best gaming podcast around. It’s surprisingly hard to find gaming podcasts whose speakers have the abilities to move beyond the kind of tired, trite rhetoric you’d get from a typical IGN or Gamespot article without coming off as pretentious or, quite simply, boring. Idle Thumbs manages to do that in a way that I’ve only seen the Games for Windows podcast successfully do back before it ended months ago. Give it a listen.

This entry was written by Trent Polack, posted on 1/21/2009 at 11:44 pm, filed under General and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.
  • gabrielceshi
    Check out SIO2 engine, good overall solution for 3D game development for iPhone and iPod touch and it's free.

    http://sio2interactive.com
  • After playing around with Cubegasm a while, I decided that I want to make as many of my side-projects as possible 2D. Working in 3D just takes so much longer and for the kinds of games I create the extra work really isn't worth it. I'm also a huge fan of the graphical style found in the work of Kenta Cho and Jonathan Mak, so I like to keep evolving that as much as I can.

    And I absolutely agree with you. Something about working on smaller projects is far more rewarding and enjoyable for me. I like being able to take a simple concept, flesh out it out over the course of a month or two, spend another month tweaking it and polishing it, and have a releasable project than I do the two-to-three year turnaround of a major commercial or AAA project. Part of this is because I work best when I'm working on fresh ideas and such, but I also just love being able to work without the pressure of a long development cycle that releases a project that fails and screws over everyone involved.

    I'm really looking into Unity for my next project and one of the reasons I'm doing this, aside from its ability to deploy projects to the iPhone, is the engine's ability to deploy games on the web. I'd love to try and figure out a relatively casual, quick-play action game and deploy it on my site. That and the iPhone platform both have a lot of the same benefits to me: large exposure, unique platform strategy, and I can feel free to try an expound a simple idea into something playable for a wide range of people.
  • Can't wait to see what you come up with. If your interested in more 2D stuff. Currently eyeing up this platform myself, throwing around ideas for a Flash to Iphone process. Unity iPhone has been getting good reviews, but still seems a bit rough. Can't speak much on the Torque iPhone, not sure how far along it is really. I wasn't blown away by the performance of the sidescroller Vimeo vid I saw (the iPhone chip is super powerful and should rock a sidescroller, not chug). Haven't messed around with Oolong really either for that matter.

    Future thinking, I think mobile apps (iPhone, and whatever the next-gen of mobile electronics turns out to be) and smaller web games (not full-on games crammed into a browser) will carve out a huge consumer slice. For example, Madden09 for 360/PS3 has 10 million players. There are a 100 million football fans. That leaves 90 million potential customers, most of whom are more likely to purchase a quasi fantasy football product on their iPhone (or more likely at work in their browser) than a super hardcore football simulator on a console.

    It's an exciting time really once you break the mystical trance of having to develop AAA action titles. I'm sure it must be fun to work on some, but most are 300 person teams with killer hours and huge risk. It's much easier to succeed selling $1000 worth of iPhone apps a day x 10 apps. The process of developing small games also reminds me of what attracted me to developing games in the first place. As a kid, I always wanted to develop the games I was playing at the time. As an adult, I am doing that but the games have changed a lot and have become much more complicated. I'm currently trying to find some middle ground, but web and iphone-type development really seems to be getting close to what I've always wanted to do.
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