Beginning iPhone Games Development

by PJ Cabrera, Peter Bakhirev, Ian Marsh, Ben Smith, Eric Wing, Scott Penberthy, Stuart Marsh, Roderick Smith

Overview

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 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 Beginning iPhone Games Development 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

For those looking for iPad game development coverage and/or iOS 5 SDK specific game coverage, check out the published Beginning iOS 5 Games Development by Lucas Jordan from Apress.

What 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 this book is for

All game developers who desire to create iPhone and/or iPod touch games.

Table of Contents

1. A Revolutionary Gaming Platform: Games for Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere
2. Developing iPhone Games: Peeking Inside the iPhone Toolbox
3. Moving Images on a Small Screen—UIKit Controls
4. She Shoots, She Hits, She Scores!
5. Flipping Out and Sweeping Away with Core Animation
6. OpenGL Basics: Wrapping Your Head Around the OpenGL AP
7. Putting It Together: Making a Game in OpenGL
8. The Next Steps: Atlases, Sprites, and Particles—Oh My
9. Introduction to Core Audio
10. Making Noise with OpenAL
11. 3D Audio—Turning Noise into Game Sound
12. Streaming: Thumping, Pulse-Quickening
13. Networking for iPhone Games: Introduction
14. Going Head to Head
15. Party Time
16. Connecting with the Outside World
17. Putting It All Together: Now Comes the Fun Part

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781430226000
Publisher:	Apress
Publication date:	05/13/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	728
File size:	5 MB

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 more than 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. 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 Award for 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 software development kit became available. Since then, he has written a dozen apps for various clients, including the games Snowferno, the award winning Mole Quest for the Terracore Gem, and the Gamebook Adventures series. 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, San Diego with a master's degree in computer engineering just days before 9/11. In the challenging world that followed, 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. 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). When he was offered co-authorship of Beginning iPhone Games Development, how could he possibly have refused 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 1970s. His addiction to writing software fully bloomed with a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 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 1990s 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.
Stuart Marsh is an independent Web developer based in Plymouth, U.K. He settled on Django after developing in several languages, including C# and PHP, and he is a contributor to the Django project. He also maintains a blog at www.BeardyGeek.com. Stuart spends his spare time playing and teaching blues guitar.

Table of Contents

1. A Revolutionary Gaming Platform: Games for Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere
2. Developing iPhone Games: Peeking Inside the iPhone Toolbox
3. Moving Images on a Small Screen—UIKit Controls
4. She Shoots, She Hits, She Scores!
5. Flipping Out and Sweeping Away with Core Animation
6. OpenGL Basics: Wrapping Your Head Around the OpenGL AP
7. Putting It Together: Making a Game in OpenGL
8. The Next Steps: Atlases, Sprites, and Particles—Oh My
9. Introduction to Core Audio
10. Making Noise with OpenAL
11. 3D Audio—Turning Noise into Game Sound
12. Streaming: Thumping, Pulse-Quickening
13. Networking for iPhone Games: Introduction
14. Going Head to Head
15. Party Time
16. Connecting with the Outside World
17. Putting It All Together: Now Comes the Fun Part