Unity has been up to a lot lately. They brought their Unity 3D engine to the iPhone, and have had many new events. A recent update from Tom Higgins their Product Evangelist has a lot of new information to offer.
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Venturing into the unknown can often be a daunting task, and Chimps Ahoy! had all the right ingredients to be very scary. Being Griptonite’s first foray into mobile games; having a short development cycle; and working on an unknown platform all combined to slightly intimidate us as a team. “Slightly” I said! However overwhelming the task might have seemed though, the excitement of being a launch title on such a unique platform instilled a thrill of adventure into the project, causing us to jump at the chance to develop a game for the iPhone.
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This summer, two EA veterans formed a company specifically to create iPhone games, that company is called Ngmoco. This stands for “Next Generation Mobile Company”. Ngmoco had been relatively quiet until recently, when it offered MacWorld a look into it’s three new offerings, and their thoughts on the iPhone game market. See the link below for the article.
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• Developer: iPhone can rival Nintendo DS, Sony PSP for games
It’s finally happened. The iPhone Developer NDA will be dropped. Another NDA will be sent out shortly, but that applies only to unreleased features, so discussion about the iPhone SDK will be allowed as soon as that is out. This also means iPhone development books can also be finally published. Read more in the announcement from Apple.
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• Apple: To Our Developers
I know I would. And that’s exactly what Steve Demeter has done with the iPhone App Store. Demeter is the developer of the game Trism, a popular puzzle game for the iPhone that he developed as a side project. He sold it for $4.99 and has made $250,000, after Apple’s 30% cut and his initial investment. Needless to say, he’s very happy with the App Store model. To read more, click the link below.
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• Silicon Alley Insider: iPhone Developer: I Just Made $250k From App Store In Two Months
For those new to developing software and want to make apps for the iPhone, learning Objective-C and Cocoa can be a daunting task. However, there is an easier solution called TileStack. Giving up the speed of the native Objective-C and Cocoa, it provides a HyperCard like interface to programming on the iPhone. MacNN has an overview of the TileStack beta.
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Independent game developer GarageGames has announced Torque-engine support for the iPhone. Torque’s development tools allow game designers to provide 2D and 3D environments in iPhone applications. Included in the new tool are a WYSIWYG realtime editor, a scripting language and integration with 3D modeling packages. Torque for Iphone includes multi-touch input support, touchscreen gesture recognition, iPhone optimized compressed textures and advanced character and shape animations. Prices for the development tools are on a per-title basis, and require contacting the company for pricing information.
Tracking the number of reviews written for each iPhone application sold in the iTunes App store won’t tell you how many times that application has been purchased and downloaded. It won’t reveal that apps’ volume writes Medialet’s David Hill. But Hill contends tracking the number of reviews users give apps will give you a sense of each app’s “relative volume” — the app’s approximate share of of the App stores’ overall volume.
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• Valleywag.com: Which iPhone apps make the most money?
Forbes.com has an article discussing the iPhone’s effect on mobile gaming with the release of the new App Store in version 2.0. It overviews the iPhone and the new 2.0 software, discussing it’s abilities as a gaming platform. Developers are viewing the iPhone as a great change in the mobile gaming platform, as it’s high resolution screen allows for better graphics, and the multi-touch and accelerometer allow for new unique controls.
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• Forbes.com: Gaming the iPhone
David Frampton of Majic Jungle Software has ported his excellent Macintosh title Chopper to the iPhone, now available on the iTunes App Store. Chopper was originally entered into the uDevGame 2003 contest here at iDevGames, winning first place in the gameplay category and several other honors.
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