Hi everybody, I've got a bunch of questions on iphone game development.. I'm going to develop my first 2D game and, as a complete neophyte, I'd need some guidance.
The test game I want to develop is pretty simple: a cat walking on the screen, which the user can direct left or right by tapping on the screen. Though I know nothing about mobile game development, I do have experience with basic scripting (Javascript and DHtml). So, according to my understanding, I basically need to merge 2D animation with touchscreen control and finally some scripting for moving my cat. Is this correct until here or am I already assuming too much? (Now I'm at the stage where I need to understand how the whole cycle works, without looking into details) 1) So, my first issue is 2D animation: how do I do 2D animation for an iphone game? I've done some research and apparently Flash is not allowed on iphone, but apparently these 2 tools are quite popular: Synfig (synfig.org) or Blender (blender.org, best fit for 3D animation, but maybe for 2D as well). What do you think? 2) Next issue about animation is whether it's possible to use a few animation files in my game (e.g., an animation with the cat walking left, and another one with the cat walking right), or whether I should export every single frame of my animation into a saparate static picture, and then connect it with each other via scripting. The second approach seems a bit outdated to me, but I got the impression this is still the way of making 2D games (using "sprites" just as in StreetFighter :p) 3) One more little thing: since I'm actually pretty good at hand drawing, I'd like to draw my cat on paper, then scan it and transform it into vector image, to be animated (within Synfig or Blender or other). Is Inkscape a good/popular software to vectorize my scans? 4) Finally, coming to the Scripting part, how shall I put my animations together and finally move my cat on the screen by capturing touschscreen events? If I understood correctly, Cocoa is the native iPhone scripting language, derived from Object C. Now, shall I use Cocoa directly (from the iphone SDK) or shall I go for some 2D gaming platform? For example, I've read about Cocos2D, Torque2D, SIO2, ChipMunk, Novashell, and others. What's the added value of all these? Well, that's quite enough for starting ;) I apologize for the annoyingly naive questions, but all the experience I have with simple game development is on Macromedia Flash, which merges vector animation and scripting together, in a rather simple way.. while in the iPhone world it seems to be necessary to use different tools and technologies... so I'm a bit lost. Can't really get clear on which direction to take. Well, thanks a lot! Steve -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iPhoneWebDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/iphonewebdev?hl=en.
