IF, like me, you’re under 25 and looking to make your fortune, you’ve probably had a thought about making a mobile game.
You put something out into the world that potentially hundreds of thousands of people will download and enjoy, and in return you make a great steaming wad of cash. Sounds like a perfect life to me! But wait, there’s all that pesky coding and programming standing between you and your millions.
Sadly that rules me out of the app game, as I’m about as C++ literate as a sparrow, but for you guys and gals with a little language sense about you, I’ve prepared this handy guide on making it in the gaming world.
Raw Materials
Sadly, this guide will only be applicable to Mac users. Sorry Windows and Linux fans, I’m sure there are plenty of great guides out there but this isn’t one of them.
With that in mind, here’s a list of what you’ll need to make the next Angry Birds.
- Â Â Â Â Â A computer (MAC)
-      Access to the internet (which I assume you have as you’re here)
-      A decent amount of free memory â€" otherwise your downloads and  programs are going to run a little slow.
-      An empty diary â€" this is going to take some time
-      IMAGINATION â€" ‘How about we throw furious cows across thescreen’ â€" if this was your idea, give up now.
9 Steps That May Make You a Millionaire
- Fire up your computer, load up your browser of choice, and head on over to Apple’s Developers page. You’ll need to find out whether your model and OS are compatible with the development program. If you’re serious about selling your game on the App Store, you’ll need to sign up to either the Standard or Enterprise Program run by Apple, but you can probably wait until you’ve gotten a finished product first.
- Sign yourself up as an official iPhone developer â€" you don’t need to provide too many details, and they send you occasional tips and motivational boosters.
- Download Apple’s iPhone Software Development Kit. The kit comes with XCode IDE, and you can download a wealth of other add-ons, such as templates and frameworks, from the website.
- Once you’ve got the SDK installed, download the iPhone sim program. The iPhone simulator acts like an old-fashioned emulator, and lets you see what your game would look like on a real iPhone as you develop!
- MATHS â€" there, that frightened you, didn’t it? Yes, unfortunately for some (especially me), having a decent grasp of math is crucial to designing a great iPhone game. You’ll need to be familiar with basic algebra at the very least.
- Get out those old coding books and really get to grips with Objective-C. This forms the building blocks of most of the iPhone games you know and love, so it’s probably the best place to start. Why not mess about with some nonsense code to see what it all does before starting on the app to rule all apps?
- PLAY GAMES â€" weren’t expecting to see this tip were you? Of course you should be playing plenty of other games while designing your own. First off, it’s great homework (as well as being great fun), but second it’s really important to be able to visualize the workings of a game. Try thinking about the sort of coding the programmers used, or what mechanics are at play. Who knows, you might spot they missed a trick and make a far, far better game â€" all thanks to homework.
- Rip all your programs to shreds. It’s not enough to get to the end of your first code and think, ‘yeah, that should work if people use it correctly’. People are stupid â€" of course they’re going to track five fingers across the screen and complain about the lack of accuracy or expect the game to make them a sandwich. The difference between a good game and a great game is crisis anticipation and prevention. Try to work out your code’s weak spots and install fail-safe’s.
- Keep in touch with other developers. Odds are, there are hundreds of thousands of other developers out there who, like you, know what they want to be doing but can’t quite work out how. Maybe someone else out there has worked out the best way of coding a levitating potato monster, or a wizard that spouts in-game currency, and it’s important to have the support of a tight and supportive community behind you as you put your all into something that could ultimately prove less than popular. Get yourself on a forum as soon as possible.
So there you have it, 9 steps to developing an iPhone game that could be the difference between Steve Jobs and menial jobs. Keep up the coding.
Author Bio: The article is authored by Jason Phillips. He is a well known writer and an expert at his field. He loves writing on video games and recently wrote on Sniper Games 365 [1] .
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