iPhone: Quartz2d vs. OpenGL ES

Question

OK, I'm still brand new to iPhone development. I have a free game on the app store, Winner Pong, but it's just a Pong clone (who would've guessed) that uses the standard UIImageViews for the sprites. Now I want to do something a little more complicated, and port my game for the Xbox 360, Trippin Alien, to the iPhone. I obviously can't keep using UIImageViews, so I was wondering which would be better to learn: the simpler, but performance-hindering Qurtz2D, or the smooth-running but dauntingly complex OpenGL ES.

My game is basically a copter game, with about 8-10 sprites on screen plus a simple particle system (video here). Not too complicated, but performance does matter. My only prior game programming experience is in Microsoft's XNA and C#, which has a built in SpriteBatch framework that makes it incredibly easy to draw, scale, and rotate pre-rendered sprites on screen. Is it worth it to learn OpenGL ES? How big is the performance gap? Is quartz really that simple?

Also, if anyone knows of any tutorials for either one, please, post them here. I need as much help as I can get.

Answer 1

Look through code samples of each to actually see the complexity. You might find that OpenGL isn't so daunting.

Regarding the performance. Core Animation, which Quartz2d is part of, uses OpenGL behind the covers, so for simple sprite animations, I would expect your game to perform fairly well.

I would also glance over the programming guide for each before making your final decision.

Answer 2

Another alternative is to use something like Unity. I recently just started playing around with the trial version of this development environment and if you're mostly doing game development with graphical objects and sprites, this may be one option to consider. You can script in C#, Javascript, or Boo. The development environment allows you to graphically setup your scenes and levels. You can then attach scripts to graphical objects for animation to handle user events, etc. One downside for Unity, which I've heard from others is that if you want to use the familiar UI controls from UIKit, it's not so easy to instantiate them...I haven't verified this myself.