So, You Want to be an iPhone Developer?

Your first foray into the app store, blunder is probably the more appropriate word.  In this series of articles, I am going to  discourage you from trying… kidding. I am actually going to share my experiences and insight from my own development of Summation and upcoming projects, and try my best to help.

1) If you are doing this to get rich, give up now. The app store is already flooded with shovelware, and occasionally even good titles just don’t catch enough attention. But if you are doing this out of LOVE, and want to turn your artistic vision into something, then at least you will enjoy the process and learn something out of it, and hopefully make some dough on the way. So — don’t quit your day job, yet. Selling an App is almost as difficult as selling a novel, believe me, I know, I have done both.

2) Tell me what your game is about, under 15 sec. If you have trouble forming coherent sentences, try to use a what-meet-what approach, like for Summation I would call it Tetris meets Sudoku. The more time you need to explain your core gameplay, the less likely your app will be successful. Trust me, research has been done. Making sure it is an original idea (or at least a copy with a twist) is important. Search the app store and identify your core audience. If there was a successful formula you wanted to plagiarize, at least do it with style, and make sure it is somewhat different, kinda like Harbor Master to Flight Control. Make sure nobody has already done the exact same thing.

3) Identify your budget and assemble your team, then set your milestone. A lot of this is project management and you might not have done it before, but it is important, even if you were only managing yourself. If you had a big budget, spend it wisely, but if you were an indie developer most likely you have next to nothing to spare. For those I suggest finding partners which you will share your future profit with or people who are willing to volunteer work or doing it next to nothing, and learning to do a lot of things yourself, if you were a programmer or artist. Or hang yourself if you are neither, because you would be simply worthless. Seriously, don’t complain about how much you have invested and how you are not getting that investment back after launching your game. Don’t be like the dude who made Dapple.

4) Back to #2, identify how you want your game to be controlled.  I have  always suggested that a puzzle game is perfect for the first time, if you don’t have experienced game programmers on your team, because your app will always be on that 1 single screen and you don’t have to deal with much frame rate issue and physics. But if you had some kind of avatar or object  in your game that you must control, I suggest using a control scheme that is actually unique to the iPhone, like accelerometer control, point and tap (like point and click adventure games), drag, multi-touch,  or draw the line type of controls. Stay away from virtual joystick. My reasoning is that if you needed a virtual joystick, your game shouldn’t be on the iPhone, it should be on the PSP. I know a lot of people may disagree with me and there are some decent games out there with decently implemented joysticks, but at the end of the day, it isn’t precise and simply not innovative.

5) If you are a programmer, then figure out how you want to develop your game. There are various frameworks that is available to be used.  Research is really the key and the internet is your best friend. If you game required physics most likely you would want to go with one of the frameworks. Cocos2D is free, if you are not doing anything with polygons. And some 3D engines like Unity is still capable of 2D, but will involve some investment since they are licensed (back to point 3). The important thing is knowing what you are going to develop and identifying which engine would save you the most work.

And that’s really it for now. Stay tuned for more and visit JetFable Studio’s Development Guide for actual coding tips.

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