Hi There, What would be the quickest route for a developer to learn to game development on the iphone. Ive some .net winforms and webform experience but no experience with direct x or any graphics and game dev. In my spare time I want to learn these skills but would like to learn via the iphone. So Im just wondering what are the best resources out there to learn iphone development and open gl on iphone. Books, websites etc, your tips are much appreciated.
Tony
You can follow the Stanford iPhone developer course for free to start with iPhone development.
hey tony - you need to start with OpenGL. i would really recommend you to read the red book on open gl - its called the bible for open gl.
regarding general iphone sdk development (objective - c, cocoa touch, etc) i would recommend you to visit http://www.iphonekicks.com - this is a digg clone but purely for iphone sdk links. here you can check out the huge database of community promoted links on different topics (including opengl)
1 last thing - iphonekicks.com also has a tag named "Newbie" where links which are meant for newbie's (not too complex articles) can be found. you can check the same here - http://www.iphonekicks.com/tags/Newbie
I'd skip OpenGL until later, I'd start off with a 2D game, otherwise its likely overwhelming. Once you have a 2D game you'll understand the platform enough to move into a 3D game, either with a custom 3D engine built on OpenGL, or using some 3D engine built by others. You might want to look into these:
But again I'd recommend 2D first, 3D means models, and lots more.
I'm doing exactly the same thing right now, and having a lot of fun with Cocos2d-iPhone. And as a primer on Cocoa, cocoadevcentral is perfect. Cocos2d uses OpenGL-ES (the mobile variant of OpenGL), but you don't have to bother yourself with it that much. It's a great foundation I think.
It depends on the type of game you want to write (e.g. shooter, strategy, cards, puzzle, etc). Really, it's the game that is important and you need to develop this before nailing down the tech and presentation.
Whilst you are learning, everything will take much longer than you think, so you should stick to a simple concept otherwise you might get discouraged and give up. Once you have done a couple of really simple games, aim for something more ambitious.
You could prototype it quickly in Windows using your exisiting experience, e.g. for a puzzle game you might use a Form and buttons instead of graphical icons and just change the text. It doesn't have to look pretty, as long as you are developing the basic game mechanic. Is it fun?!
A lot of concepts will get thrown out during prototyping. You might start again 10 times before you hit on an original idea. There are an awful lot of dross games on the iPhone. You need to distinguish yourself with good gameplay as people get bored of the looks very quickly. Don't just go with the herd.
Once you are ready to move to the iPhone I would definitely use a game library as they supply a lot of useful functionality that would take you ages to implement. You want to spend all of your time on your game, not the support code.
The following look interesting libraries: