Best Practices for the successful development of an iOS Game
It is very safe to say this thing that there will not any scarcity of the demand for iOS games anytime soon. On the App, Store games account for almost half of all the downloads.
If you have taken the decision to come into play with your own iOS game, you are required to get ready for it to be cut-throat. Presently, app developers used to submit more than 200 new games to their App Store every single day!
What makes them popular to the level of Angry Birds, while other apps which is similar to those get sunk without any trace? And what can you do for winning the love of the owners of the iPhone and iPad?
Find out how can you do the crafting of an engaging, high-grade game for iOS with these tips and tricks.
Divide and Conquer!
Before you get started you are required to think about the concept of your future app carefully and tell your game mechanics from the game content that it is going to have.
For instance, if you are going to do the development of a platformer, game mechanics are inclusive of the controls of the characters, behavior of the enemies, physics, etc. In turn, the content of the game is all the different kinds of levels of your game world.
You might have 20 or 200 levels with their own textures, objects, and landscapes for amusing the player. But the mechanics will be just similar from location to location.
For the achievement of exceptional gameplay, you are required to bear in your mind the rule: that you should model game mechanics in code. Everything else must not be in code files.
Otherwise, you will get end up with a ton of duplicate code, which is a big no-no in development. Your game will be painful and ponderous for supporting. Besides this, if you are desired to make even a single change in gameplay, you will be required to go through each of the level files that can be hundreds!
If your game is complex and rich, you can split it into resource files and gameplay files. The resource files will be storing a huge collection of different positions, objects, and animations while gameplay files will hard-code the mechanics.
Integration of time-dependent actions with cover timer
Update loop is the concept that used to orchestrate the actions of your game, which makes it world look whole. It is known to work like a timer that used to set how often the game is being rendered to the screen.
Basically, mobile games are rendered 60 frames per second. But sometimes developers give preference to setting up their own timers for particular actions.
What they often used to forget is that the global rendering speed can become slowed down most importantly in mobile games. It used to happen when the mobile game is complex, or when the iPhone that it is running on is overloaded.
Then the actions of your game used to start to run out of sync. What was that a harmonious world falls apart. Magic used to get evaporated.
For avoiding this issue, you are required to make use of the timer that your game engine serves-not your own. And when you are required to do the addition of your own particularly-timed actions, integration of them with the internal timer.
In this way, if the rendering speed goes drop down from 60 frames per second, all the time- it is dependent on the actions that will stay in sync, and your game will still be looking smooth.
Control the Consumption of Memory
Don't give your app the permission to treat the memory of the device like it is an all that you can eat buffet. You should discover that usage of the memory can be prohibited in numerous ways on the iPads and iPods, so you can't do the development of your game on the assumption that it can occupy all the available resources of the memory.
The trick for the decrement of the memory consumption is to avoid making use of the png loading function of the GLSprite Demo of Apple. It used to do the consumption of a lot of memory and caches images, which slows down the performance of your game.
Besides, you are required to think ahead when you are designing the sprites for a game that is based on iOS. You are required to make it a habit of cropping the sprites accurately and tightly when you are drawing them. If you don't take care of it the iOS system will be slow at mixing.
In a similar vein, you are always required to do the selection of the textures that assist in boosting the rendering performance of the app. Making use of the right textures also used to saves a lot of memory. You should never forget that texture compression is not available for sprites in iOS games.
Avoidance of third party libraries
Most often developers used to take the path of least resistance and they simply get indulged in building their games around third-party libraries instead of searching for their own solutions.
Well, as an iOS developer you are not eligible to pull it off. Apple used to forbid the integration of third-party mobile apps into games which means it is to be used on iPhones and iPads.
Of course, you can still take hope and a shot that is noticed by no one. But, if you are desired to be on the safer side, and you have desired your product to get featured on the App Store, you are better off avoiding third-party libraries.
Selection of the best development platform
By doing the selection of the correct development software, you can drastically bring the acceleration in the workflow and focus on the creative part of it instead of the routine. Of course, the choice is dependent on your animation, game genre, and user input solutions, etc. Look here at the major game development platforms that can pick the one that is most suitable for your goals the best.
GameMakerIt is one of the favored platforms that is among both Android and iOS game developers. It serves with all the necessary tools for the end-to-end building of games. It also has a drag-and-drop interface, and exporting tools. This system is also having a built-in script language of its own, which is similar to JavaScript. The codebase of GameMaker facilitates you to do the direct exporting of your game to the iOS platform.
StencylIt is also another platform that serves you to do the creation of games without any coding skills. It is having a rich toolset and an intuitive interface. The game that is built with its assistance has been sponsored by such leading publishers as Kongregate, ArmorGames, Newground, etc.
LiveCodeIt is a powerful coding platform for the creation of native apps and games. It serves numerous widgets, extensions, and libraries to speed up the process of their development.