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 learnHow to optimize games using iPhone SDK tools such as Instruments and Shark, and how to optimize your graphics and sound files for the best performanceInsight into the art and craft of game designHow to implement social networking in your game with RESTful web servicesTips on rapid game development with C on iPhoneHow to increase your market by developing games that run on iPhone, Mac OS X, Linux, and WindowsHow to create multiplayer iPhone gamesWho is this book for?All iPhone game developers, and anyone with an iPhone who wants to learn how games are made

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73031 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

Customer Reviews

Not what I had hoped for
This is the third book I have bought in the Apress series. I can heartily recommend the "Learn Objective C on Mac" and the "iPhone Development" books, which were well laid-out, split into easy to digest chapters and seemed like fairly complete guides to their chosen topics.

Maybe I was expecting too much from this book from it's vague description on Amazon, but it is best approached like the "Game Programming Gems" books rather than a comprehensive guide to iPhone Games/OpenGL-ES programming, which is what I (and I suspect most people) actually want.

The book is split into chapters, each of which has been written by a different author, all of which are well written, but two of which are purely about game design with no code included at all, and the others skim over fundamental details.

And when I say skim, the authors may say "it gets you interested in an idea and sets you off on your own path to discovery", which is suppose is a fair comment, or it would be if there wasn't already so much to learn before it is possible to create an iPhone game, none of which is really covered here. I found myself happily reading through the chapters, and getting to the end realising I hadn't really learnt anything except that "concept X or Y" was actually possible, but not actually how to do a proper job of it.

As an experienced gameplay programmer (C++ on the main consoles), I want to get into iPhone games development, but the lack of information anywhere about OpenGL-ES (including, disappointingly, in this book) leads me to conclude that the only way forward is to use an existing engine, such as Unity, or one of the free ones.

In summary, an easy to read book with some useful ideas, and some things I didn't realise were possible, but at 250(ish) pages, far too short and too bitty to really be of much use.

Let the author of chapter 3 write a whole book about OpenGL-ES game programming (including 3D for pity's sake) and maybe I'll be a bit happier.

Not all of those are gems...
I join the previous reviewers in their disappointment, but the most amazing thing about this book is that the material written by the book's Lead Author PJ Cabrera is such a terrible mess. First of all, the topic is barely relevant for games development, but ok, web services can be used for anything. Then PJ throws in some snippets of Rails that are incomprehensible for those who doesn't know Rails and trivial for those who does. Why were they needed at all? But then we are coming to iPhone development, finally, and this is where I am beginning to feel a doubt in the author's overall competence. He is using a UITableViewController and creates an outlet for UITableView in it... Hey, look at your own screenshot on page 35 and you will see that this controller already has a table view connected to an outlet.

I gave this book two stars because I hope it will become more useful for me after I learn more about Open GL from some other source. Otherwise, I would give it just one star. I wonder if Dave Mark whose name is on the cover has ever looked into the book.

Poor
After the excellence of Beginning iPhone Development, this book was a huge disappointment. There are some useful nuggets of information but the book is just not comprehensive enough. When it arrived I was shocked by the lack of pages. For a book costing £20 + you might have a right to expect more content.

You can probably learn most of what is in the book by reading free resources on the web. I wanted this book to be great, but it isn't and I haven't returned to it since the first reading.