I’m amazed by the iPhone. I think it’s one of the greatest gadgets in the history of anything. Unfortunately, I’m with Bell/Aliant which means I cannot get an iPhone here in Canada just yet. Luckily, my girlfriend ordered a Macbook this summer past and got a free iPod touch with it, which was a great deal for me, as I get to play with it.
For a while, I’ve wanted to build applications and games for the iPhone. I have a ton of ideas, but Cocoa Touch is not the easiest of languages for me to learn. Luckily, Stanford offers a course on iPhone development and the videos can be downloaded and watched for free on iTunes, letting any of the casual developers learn in an environment which may be easier for them. This of course is old news and everyone and their dog who’s interested in iPhone dev knows about this.
What is NOT old news however is a great tool that a co-worker pointed me towards just yesterday and I felt I had to share it with the masses who read my blog (yea right!). GameSalad is a game creation engine geared towards game enthusiasts that is literally drag and drop. The engine has a bunch of pre-built game engines which you, as the “programmer”, can simply drag and drop new graphics into and your game will be created. The best part about all of this is that GameSalad is completely FREE!! You don’t need to pay for the software, and should you choose to build a game for the iPhone and sell it on the AppStore, GameSalad asks for absolutely NO royalties. A pretty great deal.
The only major drawbacks (if you can call them that) of the product is that the games are fairly generic, though through clever graphics and learning the product a bit better, I am sure you could create some great games for the iPhone. The other problem is that it’s only available for Mac, but as a Mac user, it’s not a problem for me, and really, if you’re interested in doing any iPhone development at all, you should have a Mac!
I’ve attached a YouTube movie to the post to show just how easy the whole process is… happy “coding”.
Tags: Gaming, iphone, Programming