Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Let us see each of them in detail:
•
OpenGL
is very customizable and open-ended, but it is hard to learn,
and you need to know a lot of things just to get an image on screen. It is
good if you are an experienced programmer or a company, and you want to
write cross-platform solutions. OpenGL offers good performance, but you
have to pay with code complexity.
•
Next up is
UIKit
, which is the default iOS programming framework.
Every element that you see in a regular iOS application, such as buttons,
pickers, views, and navigation bars, comes from here. But there are only
so many games that can look good with the default interface—some trivia
games, maybe some manager games, but that's it. There are benefits to
this—your user already knows everything he can do with the interface,
gesture controls, and back buttons, and this makes it easier to actually
present your idea, but at the same time, UIKit fails to immerse your user
into the game; you get the same interface as almost every other application
in the App Store. Another big problem with UIKit is performance, or the lack
of it. After all, it was not designed for dynamic games, and if you decide to
make something complicated in it, you will find the bottleneck pretty fast.
•
Another option to consider is third-party libraries. There are dozens of them,
and few are very popular among the developers. Unity3D is good, as it offers
a cross-platform solution as well as massive numbers of tutorials. The same
can be said about Unreal 3D. But these libraries often require you to know
completely different programming languages such as C#, C++, or even
Lua. It might not be a good choice if you know Objective-C and want to
write native applications for the platform, not to mention that the level of
complexity of these frameworks is high. You need to learn a lot just before
you can have simple sprites moving on screen.
•
Another option that you have is the Cocos2d framework. It is somewhat
easy, can get you going fast, is open source, and works with Objective-C.
But as with any third-party library, it has its disadvantages. It does not
support ARC out of the box. It has problems when Apple releases new
versions of iOS—so far, every OS release had left Cocos2d code broken
in one way or another. You could have the rotation feature stop working
altogether, or suddenly some methods may fail to compile with errors.
This doesn't really work if all you want is a simple framework for
your games.
