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Product Description
Product Description
iPhone games are hot! Just look at the numbers. Games make up over 25 percent of total apps and over 70 percent of the most popular apps. Surprised? Of course not! Most of us have filled our iPhone or iPod touch with games, and many of us hope to develop the next best-selling, most talked-about game.
You’ve probably already read and mastered Beginning iPhone 3 Development; Exploring the iPhone SDK, the best-selling, the second edition of Apress’s highly acclaimed introduction to the iPhone and iPod touch by developers Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. This book is the game-specific equivalent, providing you with the same easy-to-follow, step-by-step approach, more deep technical insights, and that familiar friendly style.
While games are all about fun, at the same time, they’re serious business. With this book, you’re going to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with some hardcore coding. While you may have written games before, this book will take you further, immersing you in the following topics:
- Game graphics and animation with UIKit, Quartz, Core Animation, and OpenGL ES
- Game audio with OpenAL, MediaPlayer Framework, AV Foundation, and AudioSession
- Game networking with GameKit, Bonjour, and Internet sharing
You’ll learn:
- Efficient methods for drawing in 2D and 3D to the iPhone screen
- Game-specific animation techniques with Core Animation
- To use OpenGL ES for more complex and realistic gaming backgrounds and action
- Numerous ways to add music to enhance the gaming experience
- How to give your users access to their iPhone libraries from within games
- The tools and techniques of 3D audio for creating even more realistic gaming experiences
- How to do networking right, including two-player games over Bluetooth and multiplayer games over Wi-Fi
Who is this book for?
All game developers who desire to create iPhone and/or iPod touch games
Check out Space Rocks!, one of the project examples from Beginning iPhone Games Development:
Beginning iPhone Games Development is on Facebook!
About the Author
PJ Cabrera is a software engineer with more than 12 years of experience developing information systems in various industries, programming in C, C++, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. But his real passion for many years has been hacking gadgets (i.e., turning a Sega Dreamcast into a NetBSD router, or running Android and Debian GNU/Linux on a Palm TX) and making home-brewed games for consoles such as Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, GameBoy Advance, and PSP. He is very excited that he can finally share his creative side on iPhone and XBox 360 with the general public through the App Store and XNA Community Games.
Peter Bakhirev is a longtime software developer, with over a decade of experience in Internet technologies and network programming, and an aspiring writer and entrepreneur. During the pre-iPhone era, he helped architect and implement one of the largest online poker sites. More recently, he participated in the creation of one of the first multiplayer games for the iPhone called Scramboni.
Ian Marsh is the co-founder of the independent game studio NimbleBit based in San Diego, CA. He has been developing games for the iPhone since the advent of the App Store, with such successes as the #1 kids game Scoops and the #1 free game Hanoi. When not developing games, Ian enjoys reading about science, tweeting about game development, and finger painting.
Ben Britten Smith has been writing software on Apple platforms for 15 years. Most notably he was given an Academy Awardf or Technical Achievement for his feature film work with Mac-based suspended camera control systems. Lately he has switched his efforts from the big screen to the small screen.
His first iPhone game, SnowDude, was published to the App Store a few months after the SDK became available.Since then he has written a dozen apps for various clients including the games: Snowferno, the award winning Mole - A quest for the Terracore Gem, and the Gambook Adventures series of games. Ben lives in Melbourne, Australia with his wife Leonie and their pet bunnies.
Eric Wing is a longtime Mac developer. Feeling he was living too extravagant of a lifestyle of ramen and subsidized bus passes, Eric Wing graduated (kicking and screaming) from the University of California at San Diego with a Masters degree in Computer Engineering just days before 9/11. In the following challenging world, he worked a wide range of jobs in the field from automated testing on satellite systems to scientific visualization with a variety of different operating systems and programming languages. But in a stroke of genius (actually, it was more likely just a stroke), he figured out how he could work even harder for no money and started working on open source projects. He has been a contributor to projects such as SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer), OpenSceneGraph, and the Lua/Objective-C Bridge (and its successor LuaCocoa). And when he was offered a co-authorship of Beginning iPhone Games Development, how could he possibly refuse the idea of even more hard work for virtually no pay? It was a match made in heaven!
More information about the book can be found at Eric's website, http://playcontrol.net/iphonegamebook.
Scott Penberthy began coding shortly after the Apple II was launched in the 70’s. His addiction to writing software fully bloomed with a scholarship to MIT, where he wrote a multiplayer online game that brought his school’s antique computer to its knees. After graduating, Scott took a job at IBM Research, the birthplace of IBM’s web products and services. After running up the corporate ladder in the 90’s building massive web sites, he jettisoned in 2005 to return to his true love of coding. Now a successful entrepreneur, Scott runs an app studio in New York City.
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a few examples:
p129 it tells you to import "TextView.h" when it should say "TextSprite.h"
p121 where it tells you to use mario.jpg instead of mario.png (included in their source files) but this file looks nothing like their example and i assume they really meant to use the included file called walk.png.
p106 it reads CGFloat vectorScale;7 <--- there shouldn't be a 7 here
p100 where it tells you to write [test updateBox] and you have never defined that anywhere before
*sigh*
Last year, I had gone through Stephan Kochan's excellent Objective-C 2.0 book and then followed that with the other Apress beginner's book on the iPhone SDK (by Mark and LaMarche). I became comfortable developing apps that utilized the UIKit using the standard tab bar controllers, navigation controllers, UITableviews, etc, but wanted to venture into game development. There were very few books on the subject, and the reviews of the very few other books (which also only became available recently) were terrible. I suppose I had high hopes for this book based on the Apress Mark and LaMarche beginner's book.
CHAPTERS
Here's a list of chapters, since I didn't find this listed in the Amazon description:
01 pg 001 A Revolutionary Gaming Platform: Games for Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere
02 pg 013 Developing iPhone Games: Peeking Inside the iPhone Toolbox
03 pg 021 Moving Images on a Small Screen --UIKit Controls
04 pg 079 She Shoots, She Hits, She Scores!
05 pg 137 Flipping Out and Sweeping Away with Core Animation
06 pg 161 OpenGL Basics: Wrapping Your Head Around the OpenGL API
07 pg 203 Putting It Together: Making a Game in OpenGL
08 pg 261 The Next Steps: Atlases, Sprites, and Particles--Oh My!
09 pg 315 Introduction to Core Audio
10 pg 353 Making Noise with OpenAL
11 pg 423 3D Audio--Turning Noise into Game Sounds
12 pg 463 Streaming: Thumping, Pulse-Quickening Game Excitement
13 pg 537 Networking for iPhone Games: Introduction
14 pg 543 Going Head to Head
15 pg 583 Party Time
16 pg 637 Connecting with the Outside World
17 pg 649 Putting It All Together: Now Comes the Fun Part
I'm currently on chapter 6 and can say that this book's more than adequate for somebody of my beginning level. Nevertheless, there are some definite negatives that I noticed so far.
CONS
1. The text has the familiar format of taking the reader through the development of a single app (an Asteroids-like game). There are times in which the author(s) really hand-hold and explain every line of code, and then there are other times in which the authors will inform the reader of what code was added to the app, but gloss over any explanations. You may be thinking that perhaps the authors assumed some of the added code should be obvious to even beginners, however, the code they do not provide explanations of are not anything that a beginner or maybe even intermediate-level (non-gaming) programmer would know. Sometimes, the author will just say something like "If it sounded really confusing, don't worry, it is!" and just basically tell us to accept the code and don't worry about how it works. I got the feeling that the author(s) for some of the chapters truly do not know themselves or understand portions of their code expertly.
2. Although I do indeed remember the fundamentals of linear algebra, having taken a course on it in the past, the authors make little effort at explaining anything about transformational matrices to those who may know less than me. They use transformational matrices, of course, but I got the distinct impression that the author(s) themselves had no real idea of the fundamental principles behind the use of transformational matrices. Yes, I understand that the APIs do provide some level of abstraction, but they are still low-level enough that the reader should be given some general review of what transformational matrices do and look like mathematically. The APIs do not provide tremendous abstraction.
3. There is a moderate number of errors and you must use their website for the errata. Some of the errors are not obvious to catch. As an example, a previously used class is later subclassed, but the subclass assumes methods exist in the parent class which the text omitted when first describing the parent class previously. This may surprise you, but I don't find this too objectionable. The Mark and LaMarche beginning iPhone SDK book (first edition) was plagued with errors, too.
PROS
1. It's probably the only decent book out there for iPhone game development for beginners based on the lousy reviews of the two other books on Amazon.
2. Seems to have a lot of information on sounds, which I hadn't seen in other books or blogs regarding game development.
3. It's very comprehensive. Please see the earlier chapter listing.
4. You can buy the PDF version for $10 from the Apress website. You are given a certain amount of time to answer a question from the website about the book and if you succeed (proving that you own the book) they will send you a full book version in PDF for $10.
CONCLUSION
Like some of the other reviewers have commented, this book has frustrating moments, is uneven in its chosen level of hand-holding throughout the development of the Asteroid app, and has some difficult to spot errors, however, I still like it a lot. It's good enough and you have to give the authors a lot of credit for at least making a book for beginning game developers. I never expect a book to be the "bible" of its subject. It will allow me to throw away the book once I read it and move on to Apple's documentation and excellent blogs, like Matt Gallagher's excellent Cocoa with Love and forums like Apple's developer forums, the iPhone/iPad forum of the MacRumors website, and iPhoneDevSDK.
I will of course update this review as I finish reading it (on my iPad using the PDF).
-(void)updateBox
{
CGSize bsize = box.size;
bsize.width = width;
bsize.height = height;
box.size = bsize;
}
5 lines of code. This is to much to leave out. This is just one of the many errors. They left out this entire line. How would somebody know?
Random "#" sign on page 100 too. A radom "7" hanging out on page 106
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