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Publishing a Commercial iPhone Game, Start To Finish
Niklas Wahrman writes with this "motivational story on how a student and part-time developer was able to take an idea and turn it into an Android project and then port to iPhone for commercial release in less than a year. In the article, he focuses on how to get a game done — a problem many independent developers face. During the development of the game, Asterope, he took a lot of screenshots from many of the development stages that show how the game gradually came to life."
A detailed post-mortem is always a good thing. I have to say I love reading gamasutra's PM's - I get a much better perspective on the projects I do, if I can occasionally see how other people got through theirs.
meh
I'm thinking it was intentional since the game was intended for Android, for the challenge actually if I skimmed the article right.
ics
I think you've hit on why the iPhone/Touch platform may very well explode as a third mobile gaming market.
You currently have three markets that center mostly around three different platforms:
Sony PSP: Core gaming - games solidly in traditional genres, generally geared toward longer play sessions.
Nintendo DS: Casual gaming - some traditional genres, some breakouts, geared toward shorter play sessions.
Java/BREW: Momentary gaming - traditional genres only appear in abbreviated form; intended for the shortest play sessions; greatly limited by non-game-friendly hardware.
Nokia made a pass at expanding this last slice of the pie with the N-Gage and failed because they didn't really advance far enough beyond industry-standard cell phone hardware.
But now here is Apple, who instead of selling a compromise between console and phone, is selling a brilliant phone that happens to double as a number of other things including a game console. Add to that a second model that doesn't require leaving your existing phone, and you can see how they're poised to grab this market and perhaps take a bit from their neighbor, Nintendo.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Its amazing how many games are being released for the iPhone *every day* .... just like the iPhone (/iPod touch) platform is supposedly used more for reading eBooks than all the eBook readers together, I think the same is happening for games.
Of course while the majority of games are pretty budget right now (people in for the quick money), there's some real gems, and some are really making innovative use of the iPhone's touch interface which provides a lot of new gaming possibilities, and definitely suits some kinds of games more than others. My picks so far would have to be Galcon and Fuzzle - both highly underrated (or under-popular would be more correct) games.