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iPhone Games Projects |  | Author: PJ Cabrera
Publisher: Apress
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $19.98
as of 11/7/2009 23:30 CST details
You Save: $20.01 (50%)
New (31) Used (11) from $19.98
Seller: dutchgreek
Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 17505
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 280
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.9 x 0.8
ISBN: 1430219688
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.26
EAN: 9781430219682
ASIN: 1430219688
Publication Date: June 29, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
One look at the App Store will show you just how hot iPhone games have become. Games make up over 25 percent of all apps, and over 70 percent of the apps in the App Store's Most Popular category. Surprised? Of course not! We've all filled our iPhones with games, and many of us hope to develop the next best seller. This book is a collection of must-know information from master independent iPhone game developers. In it, you'll discover how some of the most innovative and creative game developers have made it to the pinnacle of game design and profitability. This book is loaded with practical tips for efficient development, and for creating compelling, addictive gaming experiences. And it's not all talk! It's supported with code examples that you can download and use to realize your own great ideas. This book's authors are responsible for some of the all-time most popular and talked-about games: - Brian Greenstone developed Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally.
- Aaron Fothergill developed Flick Fishing.
- Mike Lee developed Tap Tap Revolution, the most downloaded game in App Store history.
- Mike Kasprzak's Smiles was a finalist in the IGF 2009 Best Mobile Game competition.
- PJ Cabrera, Richard Zito, and Matthew Aitken (Quick Draw, Pole2Pole); Joachim Bondo (Deep Green); and Olivier Hennessy and Clayton Kane (Apache Lander) have received glowing reviews and accolades for their games.
Pair iPhone Games Projects with Apress's best-selling Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, and you'll have everything you need to create the next game to top the sales charts. What you'll learn - How to optimize games using iPhone SDK tools such as Instruments and Shark, and how to optimize your graphics and sound files for the best performance
- Insight into the art and craft of game design
- How to implement social networking in your game with RESTful web services
- Tips on rapid game development with C on iPhone
- How to increase your market by developing games that run on iPhone, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows
- How to create multiplayer iPhone games
Who is this book for? All iPhone game developers, and anyone with an iPhone who wants to learn how games are made
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 24
 Not appropriate for a course on game design November 7, 2009
Old Woman Gamer (NJ United States)
I was about to order this book as required reading for my game design class. We will build iPhone games this spring, and enrollment so far is off the charts. Regrettably, I discovered that one of the chapters uses gender exploitative games to illustrate a point that could have been made with less offensive materials. As a woman who has taught computer science for 30 years I thought the industry was beyond this sort of childishness. The chapter authors justify inclusion of this game as "a typical bar game." That the editors did not flag this is indicative of an industry that remains clueless about the potential for woman consumers in the handheld industry. For shame. While other chapters are outstanding, and informative, and exactly what I need to illustrate key points of design, I cannot in good conscience ask my students to purchase this book while trying to promote a "safe zone" in my classes. I hope the editors replace the offensive pictures and references to the offensive game in later editions.
 Don't let these reviews fool you October 24, 2009
Marc Hebert
I had look at this book on amazon before and decided not to buy it because of all the negative reviews. When I finally saw this book in my local book store, I thought I'd take a peek. I thought it was rather interesting, a lot more promising than most reviews gave it credit for anyway. So I ordered it, but had very little time to read through it. A few weeks after I had it, I had a real problem on the Iphone game I was working with, long story short : after adding sounds and trying the game out on my ipod instead of the iphone it was crashing because of lack of memory. Turns out there's a nice chapter about optimization in one of these chapters that really helped me out. Instead of hunting the internet for different tips and tricks, I read the chapter in 15-20 min which covered sounds and images optimization plus the tools used for profiling the iphone sdk. The book payed for itself that very night.
There's many books that take the approach of multiple authors with each their own tips and stories. Maybe these stories in this weren't as pertinent for people as the GPU gems, or game programing gem. Me on the other hand, I try to get all the information I can get, especially from successful game makers. From Game Developer Magazine, to Gamasutra, post-mortem are a very important aspect of my learning process for creating better games. This book was no exception.
Good Book, but you MUST understand its purpose October 14, 2009
Scott Newman (Tampa, FL)
Note: For the sake of full disclosure, let me state that I offered to review the book and I was sent a PDF copy.
The short review: This is a good book full of interesting nuggets of information from people who have written iPhone games. This is NOT a "how to program iPhone games" book. If that's what you are looking for, you will be very disappointed as some of the other reviewers were.
The longer review:
I really enjoyed the information presented in the book. The information presented is not unlike sitting around with a bunch of programmers and asking them for mini lessons and tips. You're not going to build any projects from start to finish, and each chapter is a separate chunk of information.
That being said, you're going to get a lot of exposure to code snippets and general ideas. The chapter on RESTful web services shows you how this approach is incorporated into a game project. There's a great chapter on how to design games, not from a programming perspective, but from a general design perspective. There's an interesting chapter on code optimization and how to use shark to do profiling.
The topics presented are a loose collective of general tidbits all falling under the concept of iPhone game programming. It's almost like you went to a conference and these were a handful of random sessions that you sat in on.
I would have given the book five stars it it was a little more code-centric. After all, I'd like a bit more of a take-away besides the intangibles presented. I'm sure I'm going to apply these concepts once I find the game programming book that actually teaches me game programming theory and practice.
If you like this book, I *highly* recommend "iPhone Cool Projects". It's more code-centric than this one, but still has that loose feel that lets you jump into any chapter out of order.
 Not all of those are gems... September 23, 2009
Alexander Kolesnikov (Glasgow, UK)
I join the previous reviewers in their disappointment, but the most amazing thing about this book is that the material written by the book's Lead Author PJ Cabrera is such a terrible mess. First of all, the topic is barely relevant for games development, but ok, web services can be used for anything. Then PJ throws in some snippets of Rails that are incomprehensible for those who doesn't know Rails and trivial for those who does. Why were they needed at all? But then we are coming to iPhone development, finally, and this is where I am beginning to feel a doubt in the author's overall competence. He is using a UITableViewController and creates an outlet for UITableView in it... Hey, look at your own screenshot on page 35 and you will see that this controller already has a table view connected to an outlet.
I gave this book two stars because I hope it will become more useful for me after I learn more about Open GL from some other source. Otherwise, I would give it just one star. I wonder if Dave Mark whose name is on the cover has ever looked into the book.
 Great advice September 9, 2009
L. Palm
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The games examples were a fun read, but the best thing to take home was the optimization section. It is hard to get satisfactory performance to fill that 320x480 screen full of gorgeous graphics at 30fps, so i found this book very helpful.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 24
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