Monthly Archives: July 2010

As a general rule of thumb, it’s best to stick with the latest release of Xcode. That said, there are times when running an older release can be a good thing.

You can download older versions of Xcode by logging into Apple Developer Connection – Downloads and ADC Program Assests (connect.apple.com) – You will need to be a member of the developer program to login.

Once on the site, from the Downloads section, choose Developer Tools – you will be shown with a list of all Xcode versions, back to 1.0 released in October of 2004.

There is no doubt that Cocos2d can accelerate our game development on iPhone. But do you want to be faster? You may consider iPhone Game Kit.

What is iPhone Game Kit? You may treat it as a higher level game development framework (or engine) which is built upon iPhone SDK and Cocos2d. Developers can use it as a starting point for their iPhone game development.

Why? Normally, it is still difficult for a beginner to complete a relatively complicated game after learning some techniques or doing some tutorials, because they have no ideas where to start and how to utilize the knowledge they have learnt. It is very common that the program written by beginners has a bad or inflexible structure which is difficult to extend or suffers from performance problems. Fortunately, iPhone Game Kit has built up a reliable and flexible framework for you. What you need to do is to fill in your own stuff, and the kit will handle the rest things. The author of iPhone Game Kit, who is Net Weiss, has many years game development experiences on different platforms. He knows what structure that a good game should own. The kit also contains a lot of clear codes you can use or customize , such as Joystick touch control…. The kit will include high resolution support in next version for iPad and iPhone 4, and the guide book will show you how to do that in your development.

Guide Book: iPhone Game Kit also provides a good guide book to teach you how to create a game using this kit. Based on my experience, this guide book is very readable and covers most essential things. You will know the structure of the kit and how the kit works after reading the book. Many parts explain the codes piece-by-piece and show you how to complete a task step-by-step. Of course, for some details you need to explore by yourself, but I don’t think this is difficult when you have a big picture in your head. Surprisingly, this book even covers most essential knowledge of Objective C, which means beginners won’t have difficulties in reading the codes. In addition, this guide book also shows how to create map using Tiled Map Editor, create sprite sheet using Sprite Sheet Maker, and do some simple image processing using Pixen. In a word, the beginner will know the whole story about iPhone game development after reading the book.

Art Works: The kit provides a collection of art files including characters, items, menu graphics and sound effects. These files come from Reiner‘s kind sharing. You can use them for free. I think this is very useful for individual developers.

Publishing Guide: After the developers finish building their games. They need to publish their games to App store. The kit provides a publishing guide to help beginners achieve this.

Where to get it: You can get the game kit from their web site iphonegamekit.com. It has a 50% off discount right now until 1st, September. You don’t have to wait for the newer version because it has free updates for life.

Here I want to use some words from iPhone Game Kit to end this post: “Once you have mastered the Game Kit, you will have a solid foundation to develop games on other platforms and languages“.

Disclaimer: This post is not a commercial ads. The opinions in this post are based on my own research and book reading.