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Beginning iPhone Games Development [Paperback]

PJ Cabrera (Author), Peter Bakhirev (Author), Ian Marsh (Author), Ben Smith (Author), Eric Wing (Author), Scott Penberthy (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews) |

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Book Description

Publication Date: May 14, 2010 | ISBN-10: 1430225998 | ISBN-13: 978-1430225997 | Edition: 1

iPhone games are hot! Just look at the numbers. Games make up over 25 percent of total apps and over 70 percent of the most popular apps. Surprised? Of course not! Most of us have filled our iPhone or iPod touch with games, and many of us hope to develop the next best-selling, most talked-about game.

You’ve probably already read and mastered Beginning iPhone 3 Development; Exploring the iPhone SDK, the best-selling second edition of Apress’s highly acclaimed introduction to the iPhone and iPod touch by developers Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. This book is the game-specific equivalent, providing you with the same easy-to-follow, step-by-step approach, more deep technical insights, and that familiar friendly style.

While games are all about fun, at the same time, they’re serious business. With this Beginning iPhone Games Development book, you’re going to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with some hardcore coding. While you may have written games before, this book will take you further, immersing you in the following topics:

  • Game graphics and animation with UIKit, Quartz, Core Animation, and OpenGL ES
  • Game audio with OpenAL, MediaPlayer Framework, AV Foundation, and AudioSession
  • Game networking with GameKit, Bonjour, and Internet sharing

For those looking for iPad game development coverage and/or iOS 5 SDK specific game coverage, check out the published Beginning iOS 5 Games Development by Lucas Jordan from Apress.

What you’ll learn

  • Efficient methods for drawing in 2D and 3D to the iPhone screen
  • Game-specific animation techniques with Core Animation
  • To use OpenGL ES for more complex and realistic gaming backgrounds and action
  • Numerous ways to add music to enhance the gaming experience
  • How to give your users access to their iPhone libraries from within games
  • The tools and techniques of 3D audio for creating even more realistic gaming experiences
  • How to do networking right, including two-player games over Bluetooth and multiplayer games over Wi-Fi

Who this book is for

All game developers who desire to create iPhone and/or iPod touch games.

Table of Contents

  1. A Revolutionary Gaming Platform
  2. Games for Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere
  3. Developing iPhone Games
  4. Peeking Inside the iPhone Toolbox
  5. Moving Images on a Small Screen—UIKit Controls
  6. She Shoots, She Hits, She Scores! 
  7. Flipping Out and Sweeping Away with Core Animation
  8. OpenGL Basics: Wrapping Your Head
  9. Around the OpenGL AP
  10. Putting It Together: Making a Game in OpenGL
  11. The Next Steps: Atlases, Sprites, and Particles—Oh My
  12. Introduction to Core Audio
  13. Making Noise with OpenAL
  14. 3D Audio—Turning Noise into Game Sound
  15. Streaming: Thumping, Pulse-Quickening
  16. Game Excitement
  17. Networking for iPhone Games: Introductio
  18.  Going Head to Head
  19. Party Time
  20. Connecting with the Outside World
  21. Putting It All Together: Now Comes the Fun Part

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

PJ Cabrera is a software engineer with more than 12 years of experience developing information systems in various industries, programming in C, C++, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. But his real passion for many years has been hacking gadgets (i.e., turning a Sega Dreamcast into a NetBSD router, or running Android and Debian GNU/Linux on a Palm TX) and making home-brewed games for consoles such as Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, GameBoy Advance, and PSP. He is very excited that he can finally share his creative side on iPhone and XBox 360 with the general public through the App Store and XNA Community Games.

Peter Bakhirev is a longtime software developer, with more than a decade of experience in Internet technologies and network programming, and an aspiring writer and entrepreneur. During the pre-iPhone era, he helped architect and implement one of the largest online poker sites. More recently, he participated in the creation of one of the first multiplayer games for the iPhone called Scramboni.

Ian Marsh is the co-founder of the independent game studio NimbleBit, based in San Diego. He has been developing games for the iPhone since the advent of the App Store, with such successes as the #1 kids' game Scoops and the #1 free game Hanoi. When not developing games, Ian enjoys reading about science, tweeting about game development, and finger painting.

Ben Britten Smith has been writing software on Apple platforms for 15 years. Most notably, he was given an Academy Award for technical achievement for his feature film work with Mac-based suspended camera control systems. Lately, he has switched his efforts from the big screen to the small screen.

His first iPhone game, SnowDude, was published to the App Store a few months after the software development kit became available. Since then, he has written a dozen apps for various clients, including the games Snowferno, the award winning Mole—Quest for the Terracore Gem, and the Gamebook Adventures series. Ben lives in Melbourne, Australia with his wife, Leonie, and their pet bunnies.



Eric Wing is a longtime Mac developer. Feeling he was living too extravagant of a lifestyle of ramen and subsidized bus passes, Eric Wing graduated (kicking and screaming) from the University of California, San Diego with a master's degree in computer engineering just days before 9/11. In the challenging world that followed, he worked a wide range of jobs in the field—from automated testing on satellite systems, to scientific visualization with a variety of different operating systems and programming languages. In a stroke of genius (actually, it was more likely just a stroke), he figured out how he could work even harder for no money and started working on open-source projects. He has been a contributor to projects such as SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer), OpenSceneGraph, and the Lua/Objective-C Bridge (and its successor LuaCocoa). When he was offered co-authorship of Beginning iPhone Games Development, how could he possibly have refused the idea of even more hard work for virtually no pay? It was a match made in heaven!

More information about the book can be found at Eric's website, http://playcontrol.net/iphonegamebook.

Scott Penberthy began coding shortly after the Apple II was launched in the 1970s. His addiction to writing software fully bloomed with a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he wrote a multiplayer online game that brought his school’s antique computer to its knees. After graduating, Scott took a job at IBM Research, the birthplace of IBM’s web products and services. After running up the corporate ladder in the 1990s building massive web sites, he jettisoned in 2005 to return to his true love of coding. Now a successful entrepreneur, Scott runs an app studio in New York City.

Stuart Marsh is an independent Web developer based in Plymouth, U.K. He settled on Django after developing in several languages, including C# and PHP, and he is a contributor to the Django project. He also maintains a blog at www.BeardyGeek.com. Stuart spends his spare time playing and teaching blues guitar.

Cheridan Smith has been involved in Web development and design since 1997, when she began working on a research team for the "Y2K" millennium bug. It was here that she learnt about the Internet and promptly fell in love with the medium. In her career, she has been responsible for websites in the early 2000s, such as Weight Watchers Australia and Quicken.com.au, and worked as creative services manager of Yahoo! in Australia with clients such as Toyota, 20th Century Fox and Ford. She works as a senior interactive project manager for an Australian advertising agency.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 728 pages
  • Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (May 14, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1430225998
  • ISBN-13: 978-1430225997
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #194,870 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Peter Bakhirev Page
Peter Bakhirev
Peter Bakhirev was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and now lives in New York. He is a long time software developer and technology aficionado.

Peter can be found on Twitter: http://twitter.com/byteclub

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
42 of 43 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I am nearing the end of the 4th chapter of the book and I had to get on amazon to review this because I am so frustrated. This would have been a great book except the code examples are littered with typos and mistakes that will prevent your code from compiling if you are following along. I am new to Objective C programming and i was literally spent an hour trying to figure out why my code wouldn't compile just to realize the book made a mistake. I mean i'm only on chapter 4 and it is driving me crazy.
a few examples:
p129 it tells you to import "TextView.h" when it should say "TextSprite.h"
p121 where it tells you to use mario.jpg instead of mario.png (included in their source files) but this file looks nothing like their example and i assume they really meant to use the included file called walk.png.
p106 it reads CGFloat vectorScale;7 <--- there shouldn't be a 7 here
p100 where it tells you to write [test updateBox] and you have never defined that anywhere before

*sigh*
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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
INTRODUCTION
Last year, I had gone through Stephan Kochan's excellent Objective-C 2.0 book and then followed that with the other Apress beginner's book on the iPhone SDK (by Mark and LaMarche). I became comfortable developing apps that utilized the UIKit using the standard tab bar controllers, navigation controllers, UITableviews, etc, but wanted to venture into game development. There were very few books on the subject, and the reviews of the very few other books (which also only became available recently) were terrible. I suppose I had high hopes for this book based on the Apress Mark and LaMarche beginner's book.

CHAPTERS
Here's a list of chapters, since I didn't find this listed in the Amazon description:

01 pg 001 A Revolutionary Gaming Platform: Games for Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere
02 pg 013 Developing iPhone Games: Peeking Inside the iPhone Toolbox
03 pg 021 Moving Images on a Small Screen --UIKit Controls
04 pg 079 She Shoots, She Hits, She Scores!
05 pg 137 Flipping Out and Sweeping Away with Core Animation
06 pg 161 OpenGL Basics: Wrapping Your Head Around the OpenGL API
07 pg 203 Putting It Together: Making a Game in OpenGL
08 pg 261 The Next Steps: Atlases, Sprites, and Particles--Oh My!
09 pg 315 Introduction to Core Audio
10 pg 353 Making Noise with OpenAL
11 pg 423 3D Audio--Turning Noise into Game Sounds
12 pg 463 Streaming: Thumping, Pulse-Quickening Game Excitement
13 pg 537 Networking for iPhone Games: Introduction
14 pg 543 Going Head to Head
15 pg 583 Party Time
16 pg 637 Connecting with the Outside World
17 pg 649 Putting It All Together: Now Comes the Fun Part

I'm currently on chapter 6 and can say that this book's more than adequate for somebody of my beginning level. Nevertheless, there are some definite negatives that I noticed so far.

CONS
1. The text has the familiar format of taking the reader through the development of a single app (an Asteroids-like game). There are times in which the author(s) really hand-hold and explain every line of code, and then there are other times in which the authors will inform the reader of what code was added to the app, but gloss over any explanations. You may be thinking that perhaps the authors assumed some of the added code should be obvious to even beginners, however, the code they do not provide explanations of are not anything that a beginner or maybe even intermediate-level (non-gaming) programmer would know. Sometimes, the author will just say something like "If it sounded really confusing, don't worry, it is!" and just basically tell us to accept the code and don't worry about how it works. I got the feeling that the author(s) for some of the chapters truly do not know themselves or understand portions of their code expertly.

2. Although I do indeed remember the fundamentals of linear algebra, having taken a course on it in the past, the authors make little effort at explaining anything about transformational matrices to those who may know less than me. They use transformational matrices, of course, but I got the distinct impression that the author(s) themselves had no real idea of the fundamental principles behind the use of transformational matrices. Yes, I understand that the APIs do provide some level of abstraction, but they are still low-level enough that the reader should be given some general review of what transformational matrices do and look like mathematically. The APIs do not provide tremendous abstraction.

3. There is a moderate number of errors and you must use their website for the errata. Some of the errors are not obvious to catch. As an example, a previously used class is later subclassed, but the subclass assumes methods exist in the parent class which the text omitted when first describing the parent class previously. This may surprise you, but I don't find this too objectionable. The Mark and LaMarche beginning iPhone SDK book (first edition) was plagued with errors, too.

PROS
1. It's probably the only decent book out there for iPhone game development for beginners based on the lousy reviews of the two other books on Amazon.
2. Seems to have a lot of information on sounds, which I hadn't seen in other books or blogs regarding game development.
3. It's very comprehensive. Please see the earlier chapter listing.
4. You can buy the PDF version for $10 from the Apress website. You are given a certain amount of time to answer a question from the website about the book and if you succeed (proving that you own the book) they will send you a full book version in PDF for $10.

CONCLUSION
Like some of the other reviewers have commented, this book has frustrating moments, is uneven in its chosen level of hand-holding throughout the development of the Asteroid app, and has some difficult to spot errors, however, I still like it a lot. It's good enough and you have to give the authors a lot of credit for at least making a book for beginning game developers. I never expect a book to be the "bible" of its subject. It will allow me to throw away the book once I read it and move on to Apple's documentation and excellent blogs, like Matt Gallagher's excellent Cocoa with Love and forums like Apple's developer forums, the iPhone/iPad forum of the MacRumors website, and iPhoneDevSDK.

I will of course update this review as I finish reading it (on my iPad using the PDF).
Comment | 
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26 of 32 people found the following review helpful
To Many Mistakes May 26, 2010
Format:Paperback
This is a programming book. Little margin for error. To Many Mistakes. Just in the first 100 pages there are major screw ups. I was so looking forward to this book. There are websites on-line where people have found the same mistakes. Here is a error from page 100.

-(void)updateBox
{
CGSize bsize = box.size;
bsize.width = width;
bsize.height = height;
box.size = bsize;
}

5 lines of code. This is to much to leave out. This is just one of the many errors. They left out this entire line. How would somebody know?
Random "#" sign on page 100 too. A radom "7" hanging out on page 106
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Needs to be updated
This book was written back when we had the iPhone 3G and a much older version of Xcode. It badly needs an update.
Published 6 months ago by J. R. Perkins
Good Book for a Specific Strategy
Obviously this book, and any like it, is almost instantly dated from the moment you start reading. This book assumes a good amount of programming knowledge and some knowledge of... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Benjamin L. Chirlin
Not for beginners!
This book gets pretty in-depth with 3D graphics and sound. I think 1/3rd of the book or more is just about sound. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Robert V
A meaty book.
This book is full of solid techniques for creating certain kinds of games, with lots of explanation and plenty of sample code to study. Read more
Published 15 months ago by RobertL
Typos and omissions
I was really looking forward to this book helping me enter the use of OpenGL and other frameworks to begin making advanced iPhone games, but unfortunately the book has left me high... Read more
Published 16 months ago by WYkkYD
Great introduction to game development
When the publisher sent me a copy of this book to review I wasn't expecting too much. In fact I put off reading it for a long time. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Ed Burnette
Great book, don't believe the hype
Gets you up and coding quickly. I went through the Apple Dev tutorials but was put off by the huge amount of code to produce such little results there. Read more
Published 20 months ago by c.graves
Price for Kindle version higher than paperback!?
I was thinking to buy the kindle version of this book but then I saw that it is priced much higher than the paperback edition. How is that? Read more
Published 21 months ago by Fernando Portela
Mostly Okay
The authors of the book has neglected one vital area: actually working through the projects in each chapter to make sure that they work. Read more
Published 21 months ago by John D. Love-jensen
Great for novice game developers
Developing productivity apps is my comfort zone, but occasionally, I tinker with the idea of creating a game. But game programming requires quite a different set of skills. Read more
Published 21 months ago by Dave Wooldridge
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