i Welcome to iOS Games!

Developing and designing games for iOS requires a number of tools and frameworks. For instance, you’ll use Xcode, a free integrated development environment (IDE) from Apple; and Objective-C, the native language used in iOS.

Along with the Xcode/Objective-C combo you’ll need a few other tools and applications to create game. Here’s a quick overview of some of them.

Tools

These tools are required for designing and developing games in iOS 5.

Xcode

Xcode is the development environment you will use to program iOS apps and games. The latest version, used in this book, is 4.2 with iOS SDK 5.0. Xcode is a total development environment offering coding, interface design, building, debugging, testing, and profiling in a single interface.

iOS Simulator

The iOS Simulator lets you test your apps and games as if they were running on one of three different iOS devices: a standard iPhone 320×480, a retina iPhone 640×960, and an iPad 1024×768. You can test for all three devices without owning the actual hardware.

Other Tools

Some tools aren’t required, but are handy during the development process.

Preview

Preview does much more than simply previewing images and PDFs. It is also an excellent basic image editor for cropping, cutting, and scaling graphics.

Hiero

Hiero converts a font set to an image file that can be used when rendering fonts in OpenGL ES.

Audacity

Audacity is an open source audio editor that opens many sound file formats. It allows you to trim sound clips, adjust sound levels, and much more when creating sound effects for your game.

Pen and Paper

It may seem like “retrotech,” but when designing your game, pen and paper are invaluable for prototyping your ideas. As a preliminary step in game design, you can sketch game objects and interface, quickly committing your ideas to the concept phase.