Home › Forums › General Discussion › Looking for advice plz.
Tagged: books, kits, starter kit
| Author | Posts |
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| Author | Posts |
| December 30, 2010 at 10:40 am #285 | |
 Shadowghost135 | Hello everyone, I just wanted to introduce myself and see if anyone would be willing to help me out with a little info. “To not beat about the bush”, my question is simply this….is this kit really worth it? I ask only because I’ve tried so many other platforms and tutorials and I always find myself getting lost in a bunch of jargon I can seem to understand. All my life I’ve wanted to do nothing more than become a video game designer, and now with the modern wonder of the ipod, iphone, and ipad, I see a chance at actually getting to reach this goal. I’m just so tired of being lost in what I’m doing, and wasting my hard earned money, only to find that what I hoped would help teach me leaves me with more questions than answers. Can some of you real people give me a little guidance in this plz, and tell me is this “Iphone Game Kit” worth the money, as good as it is made out to be, and can it really help me on my way to creating “REAL” games? Thank you all so much for your time. :-D |
| December 30, 2010 at 7:26 pm #1046 | |
 stahlmanDesign | I got the kit while it was on special for $50 and it has been worth much more than that for me. If you want to use the provided art and just design different levels, then you can definitely make your own levels and characters in 24 working hours (spread over several days). I wanted to make a quest game, so this kit was exactly what I was looking for. It doesn’t have gravity built in to it, so if you want to make a platform game like Super Mario, then it will have to be modified. It has taken me several months to figure this out on my own, but I did figure it out. Objective-C is not a scripting language like AS3. The Cocos2D framework helps, but it’s still quite a bit more complex than what I was comfortable with at the beginning. If you know about object oriented programming, then you’ll be fine. If you don’t, you might be overwhelmed. This is not a drag-and-drop game design kit. It’s real programming, with most of the hard parts already done for you (looking at how those things were done often helps to learn how to do new things). But there’s just no getting around the fact that programming is difficult for those of us who didn’t study computer science. If making a game is what you’ve wanted to do all your life, then this kit should be valuable. I think programming games in Flash was much easier, but there are advantages to biting the bullet and getting into the actual code used in iOS and OSX. You will always have more questions than answers. |
| December 30, 2010 at 8:02 pm #1048 | |
 pbacchi | I found this iPhone Game Kit very valuable, however I have a Computer Science degree and have been reading about the iPhone SDK since 2008. I purchased a Mac mini Dec 8th 2008 and became registered iPhone Developer shortly thereafter. Xcode3 Unleashed I had some familiarity with C to start with. I could write simple programs in C. I have never written a game, in any language. I have never written a large or even medium sized program. I started down this path with an enormous number of questions. The iPhone Game Kit answered a LOT of questions for me and I feel has moved me much much closer to the goal of making a game for the iDevices. How well it will do for you really depends on where you are starting from. I will give the Kit a lot of credit tho, by including 2 games, Monster Checkers and Quexlor Lite, both available for free on the app store, AND including the source code for both games, I was able to study the code and learn an enormous amount in a very short time. Of the two programs, Monster Checkers is much simpler to understand how it works from start to finish. Are the games the best in the world.. well no, its not Angry Birds or Pocket Frogs, but they are good enough games to accomplish the goal of the kit, to teach how to build a real game with art and sound and code, (and get it in the app store, from start to finish. |
| December 30, 2010 at 11:02 pm #1052 | |
| pbacchi | oh.. I totally forgot.. two FANTASTIC Resources goto iTunesU and check out the Stanford University courses (Stanford University is near Apple) and best of all at Development Videos – Apple Developer You have to be a registered developer to download the apple videos. I think the free registration can get them but as I am in the paid dev program I do not know. Go try and and see. |
| December 31, 2010 at 4:58 am #1057 | |
 CyberGreg |
100% YES Now, from reading your post, you may want to get some iOS programming under your belt first. As Stahlman aptly pointed out, this isn’t Game Salad where you can know nothing and create a working game. The other reccomendations for iTunesU Stanford courses are a must. If you can make it through those and get comfortable, this kit might help. I too have purchased several software packages and hands down, this one is the best one I’ve found. Good luck |
| January 3, 2011 at 2:17 pm #1067 | |
| Shadowghost135 | Thanks so much everyone for your advice, I am really grateful. I’m still working on learning some of the programming languages that I need, and think that I will give this a shot. However, I’m gonna try and wait for one of the good sales to happen again. :-) In the mean time, I’ve got some new resources….thanks guys. |
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