How it's new stuff bought in the app store integrated to my iphone app ?

Question

I'm writing an app for iPhone and I would like to add downloadable content to get from the apple store in the future. I understand that the Store kit gives me access to the store and helps me to make the transactions, but how the downloaded content is integrated with my app ?

How It's usually done ?, when someone creates for example, a new Item or a new weapon for his game...how It's implemented and how It's added to the app ?, the graphic resources of the item need to be already included in the original app or there is a way to add more in the future ?

I need to have special considerations with my app to make it happen ?

Answer 1

Basically, you'll have to build support into your application to handle such downloadable content. If you want to allow downloads of new weapons, you'll have to think about how that has to be integrated into the application. Off the top of my head, here's the things I can think about that you'll have to handle:

• What does the weapon look like, so you need graphics, and a way to integrate new graphics resources (like 3d models and bitmaps) into your existing graphics resources (that is, you should be able to load graphics resources both from the resource files supplied with your app when they buy it as well as from files on disk which comes from downloaded content)
• How does the weapon function, like damage profiles, protection profiles (of how enemies in the game can withstand it)
• How is the weapon obtained, like a position in a ingame map or something, or as a reward for something, in which case you need to store rules for how to check if the reward is warranted
• How do you obtain ammo for the weapon?

You basically need to think through how downloadable content would need to have framework support already present in your game in order to be fully incorporated into the various parts of the game mechanics.