2D Game Character Animation in iPhone - How is it done?

Question

What I mean is, do animators work on an animation in say Flash (or some other kind of key frame animation program) and then export it to the iphone somehow?

For example, say I am an animator and I want to create a person waving for an iphone game. What type of external program would I use and then what libraries on the iphone sdk would I use to load them in?

Answer 1

The iPhone natively supports key frame animation with the CAKeyframeAnimation class.

Answer 2

I think the most popular framework for 2D games is Cocos2D: http://cocos2d.org/

Answer 3

I think it all depends on how in depth you want to get. Making a 2D game is a broad statement. For example, to make what you ask. You would just make a series of PNG images for a cell based animation of the wave. wave1.png, wave2.png, waveN.png...

Then load the PNG images in and then play them in sequence. You can do this with UIImageView, Core Animations classes, or manually your self with UIImages and UIViews.

There a lot of great game engines you can check out too. Here is a link for an example of what is available. Game Engines

For the best performance, most companies/developers use OpenGL to do both 2D and 3D style games. You can utilize a lot of tricks for the textures used in your games.