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Product Description
Product Description
One look at the App Store will show you just how hot iPhone games have become. Games make up over 25 percent of all apps, and over 70 percent of the apps in the App Store's Most Popular category. Surprised? Of course not! We've all filled our iPhones with games, and many of us hope to develop the next best seller.
This book is a collection of must-know information from master independent iPhone game developers. In it, you'll discover how some of the most innovative and creative game developers have made it to the pinnacle of game design and profitability. This book is loaded with practical tips for efficient development, and for creating compelling, addictive gaming experiences. And it's not all talk! It's supported with code examples that you can download and use to realize your own great ideas.
This book's authors are responsible for some of the all-time most popular and talked-about games:
- Brian Greenstone developed Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally.
- Aaron Fothergill developed Flick Fishing.
- Mike Lee developed Tap Tap Revolution, the most downloaded game in App Store history.
- Mike Kasprzak's Smiles was a finalist in the IGF 2009 Best Mobile Game competition.
- PJ Cabrera, Richard Zito, and Matthew Aitken (Quick Draw, Pole2Pole); Joachim Bondo (Deep Green); and Olivier Hennessy and Clayton Kane (Apache Lander) have received glowing reviews and accolades for their games.
Pair iPhone Games Projects with Apress's best-selling Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, and you'll have everything you need to create the next game to top the sales charts.
What you'll learn
- How to optimize games using iPhone SDK tools such as Instruments and Shark, and how to optimize your graphics and sound files for the best performance
- Insight into the art and craft of game design
- How to implement social networking in your game with RESTful web services
- Tips on rapid game development with C on iPhone
- How to increase your market by developing games that run on iPhone, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows
- How to create multiplayer iPhone games
Who is this book for?
All iPhone game developers, and anyone with an iPhone who wants to learn how games are made
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.
Mike Lee, the world’s toughest programmer, is the founder and CEO of United Lemur, a philanthropic revolution disguised as a software company. Mike has had a role in creating many popular iPhone applications, including Obama ‘08, Tap Tap Revenge, Twinkle, and Jott.
Prior to iPhone, Mike cut his teeth — and won an Apple Design Award — at Seattle–based Delicious Monster Software. Mike is originally from Honolulu, is a popular blogger and occasional pundit, and has been seen on Twitter as @bmf.
Mike and his wife are originally from Honolulu, but currently live in Silicon Valley where they are raising two cats. Mike’s hobbies include weightlifting, single malts, and fire.
Mike can be contacted at mike@unitedlemur.org.
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This is not a book with details on a variety of games with hands-on programming examples and ideas on how to make the gameplay work well on the iPhone. It is a collection of chapters of iPhone game building advice. The advice is often excellent, and the book is a unique source for this information. But know that you will bump into phrases like "I hope I've inspired you" and "the true future of iPhone game development is up to you, dear reader". So the advice is also often cheesy, bathetic, and almost maudlin.
Imagine if you met an experienced iPhone developer that had just finished a big project. Then you asked him/her: "Have any advice for me when building an iPhone game"? That is what this book is. If you feel that would help you, then dive on in.
IMHO, this was not enough material worthy of an entire book. Some chapters are excellent, but many of them read as if they would be magazine articles. They are that general and light on details.
I have several of the Apress books, and this one is a disappointment. I finished it in 2 hours and don't feel there will many times I will pull it off the bookshelf in the future. This book should be called "iPhone Advice and Occasional Tips from Game Developers".
What I liked about this book:
First, the best thing about this book, and really what makes it worthwhile, is that it's written by people that are actually making their livelihood by developing games on the iPhone. So the advice is all very concrete, practical and the examples all come from the real world.
The technical advice ranges from very general stuff, to moderately technical. Often the advice is worthwhile to casual game dev in general, but not specific to iPhone.
The chapters that did provide code samples or downloads were very useful, and the code was good, real-world examples. The chapters tended to illustrate a particular tip or trick, which could be very helpful if that was something useful to you, but might be completely useless if not. For example, if (like myself) you are hoping to write games in C/C++ (mostly) that can be released on both iPhone and desktop, then the chapter on cross platform development is extremely helpful. But if you are targeting iPhone only, it's not very relevant.
Also, the quality of the book was very good, with full color illustrations throughout.
What I didn't like:
Calling this "Projects" is very misleading. Very few examples are 'projects', i.e. walking you through a tutorial-style project that you can recreate. If you are familiar with the "Game Programming Gems" series, then this book is much closer to that -- a collection of tips, tricks and techniques from practitioners.
Some of the advice (for example, the "Design Doc" chapter, or the "Interface Design" one) is good advice for game development, but not particularly specific for the iPhone. If you are familiar with the process of game development on another platform, a lot of this will be familiar advice.
In particular, I was disappointed not to see much discussion of the iPhone's unique input features like the accelerometers and multi-touch.
Overall, this is a good book but it has a bit of an identity crisis. Some of the articles are fairly technical, while others are appropriate for beginners (or even non-programmers "game designers"). There's a little something for everyone in here, but the flip side of that means that there will probably be a few chapters that you could live without.
The short review: This is a good book full of interesting nuggets of information from people who have written iPhone games. This is NOT a "how to program iPhone games" book. If that's what you are looking for, you will be very disappointed as some of the other reviewers were.
The longer review:
I really enjoyed the information presented in the book. The information presented is not unlike sitting around with a bunch of programmers and asking them for mini lessons and tips. You're not going to build any projects from start to finish, and each chapter is a separate chunk of information.
That being said, you're going to get a lot of exposure to code snippets and general ideas. The chapter on RESTful web services shows you how this approach is incorporated into a game project. There's a great chapter on how to design games, not from a programming perspective, but from a general design perspective. There's an interesting chapter on code optimization and how to use shark to do profiling.
The topics presented are a loose collective of general tidbits all falling under the concept of iPhone game programming. It's almost like you went to a conference and these were a handful of random sessions that you sat in on.
I would have given the book five stars it it was a little more code-centric. After all, I'd like a bit more of a take-away besides the intangibles presented. I'm sure I'm going to apply these concepts once I find the game programming book that actually teaches me game programming theory and practice.
If you like this book, I *highly* recommend "iPhone Cool Projects". It's more code-centric than this one, but still has that loose feel that lets you jump into any chapter out of order.
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