iPhone Game Kit Review
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“.
Update: The new version 2.0 came out. A new chapter about iOS4 high resolution display and multi-thread programming is added. Now people can use Paypal to make a payment.
Disclaimer: This post is not a commercial ads. The opinions in this post are based on my own research and book reading.
There’s 2 things which bother me a bit about this Kit :
1) here’s the text of Reiner’s disclaimer : The meshes and textures are not public ware though. Please respect my copyright. You can use them freely. But you are not allowed to sell them, nor make any other things with it that directly competes with my page. Like uploading it to your page so that others can download them.
It feels like the Kit actually violates the terms
2) No Paypal payment for the Kit? Lot of people like me won’t leave their CC number on a random page in Internet
However the idea is awesome – wish you luck
@Marin Todorov
Hi Marin,
Thanks for your reply. I have sent your concerns to the author of
iPhone Game Kit. I think he will response shortly:)
Hi Marin.
Your concerns are completely valid. We should definitely make it more clear that Reiner has given us express, legal permission to include his artwork into our organized package. We are definitely legit. Thank you for pointing this out.
In addition, we now offer Paypal as a payment option.
Thanks again for your feedback.
@Nathanael, glad to hear that – Reiner does some pretty awesome stuff and gives them away for free, you understand my concerns. However congrats on the fast reaction- I definitely think PayPal will increase your conversion rate.
@Kyle – thanks for letting Nat know
best, Marin
I’m interested in this, and asked some questions on the forum, got no answers. The descriptions they show on the page seem to indicate that they cover pretty much everything you need to make a game, in a 127 page book? But, it doesn’t mention device orientation, what happens when the phone receives a call or text. These are essential things to understand, does this kit go through this for iOS4?
@Andrew
Hi Andrew,
I try to answer your questions based on my understandings.
As I said, iPhone Game Kit is just a framework for game development, which can significantly accelerate your development process because it has done a lot of things for you in the background. You don’t have to write these codes yourself and worry about the underground details. The reason why this framework works effectively is because most games follow the similar modes or patterns, e.g., have characters, are level-based, have menu, save states, etc. Therefore, you can quickly apply this framework in writing different games by filling different things (e.g., different characters, stories, graphics, etc). Of course, the cost is obvious. You will lose some flexibilities. But this always happens when you are writing programs using other frameworks on different platforms. Frankly I don’t think this is a serious problem. When you become familiar with this kit, you can change its behavior easily.
It is impossible for a 100 page book to cover all of things about iPhone development. But the author covers most essential things on how to use this kit to write your own games. And I think more stuff will be added into this book in the following versions.
“it doesn’t mention device orientation”
You can easily set the orientation in the kit.
“What happens when the phone receives a call or text?”
This book doesn’t cover this, as I said, this book is not a reference book. But you could find answers from Apple’s documents. For this question, you will receive messages when the phone receives a call. The first message you will receive is applicationWillResignActive. Then the phone will let the user choose answer or dismiss the call. If the user chooses answer, you will receive applicationWillTerminate message, so you need to save the state of your game quickly. If the user choose dismiss, you will receive applicationDidBecomeActive message. The game will continue. This is how the system works in OS 3. I am not sure how it works in OS4, but I think they should be very similar except the OS 4 can let an app run in background.
Hope this is helpful for you.
@Andrew Well, good news Andrew, usually games don’t support different orientations (at least I never seen one) so I won’t worry about that. Furthermore the Kit is using Cocos2D (as it’s written on their web site) so all the basic stuff, like accelerometer, basic UI, memory management, etc is actually handled by the Cocos2D, so these are taken care of