CIS 4002: Advanced Projects in Computer Game Design

iPhone Development

One of the options for this class is to develop on the iPhone. The iPhone is becoming a very popular game development platform, and is being adopted by major game developers like Electronic Arts. If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you should seriously consider creating a game for this platform. With that said, we are not providing you with complementary iPhones or iPod Touch devices; you are responsible for providing these if you want to develop on this platform.

iPhone University Developer Program

Even if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, there are some hurdles in developing for this platform. In particular, the free iPhone SDK allows anyone to write an iPhone program, but you cannot load a game onto a physical device without membership in the iPhone Developer Program (which costs at least $100); your games are limited to the iPhone simulator on OS X. Furthermore, even with this membership, loading apps on to a device involves many hurdles regarding approval via Apple.

In order to simplify iPhone development, we have applied for admission to the iPhone University Developer Program; we are currently waiting on authorization from Apple. Once we receive this authorization, you will be able to upload your game to your iPhone or iPod Touch without having to go through the iTunes App Store. This program will provide us with a "sandbox" that allows everyone in the class to play everyone else's games, though we cannot distribute them outside the class. We will provide you with more details as they become available.

SDK Resources

In order to develop for the iPhone, you will need to work on a Macintosh with the iPhone SDK (which will be made available through the iPhone University Developer Program). There are a lot of resoures available online for learning iPhone development. Here are a small list of resources in order to get you started.

Your First iPhone Application
This is the "Hello World!" of iPhone development.
Getting Started with ...
From the Apple developer site, this is a list of several guides to get you started on the various aspects of iPhone development, such as networking, animation, the touch screen interface, and so on.
Stanford's iPhone Development Course
Stanford has released the lecture notes and examples for this course to the world, free for you to use.
iPhone Game Programming Tutorials
This is a nice collection of hands on tutorials written for iCodeBlog. The very first one (scroll to the bottom of the page) is a fairly extensive tutorial involving a pong variant.
Mobile Orchard
While less game-oriented than iCodeBlog, this is another excellent developer blog for working on the iPhone.
iPhone Development Bits
Another developer blog that contains many examples of how to do some more esoteric things with your iPhone.
Bullet Physics Engine
This is a free physics engine used by many iPhone games.

If you find any more resources on your own, let us know and we will add them to the list. We are particularly interested in any open source libraries for aiding in game development.