A year ago I was working on Star Catch for the iPhone. I got started by going out and buying my laptop. When I got it and got home the first thing I did was set my laptop up and begin getting everything I needed to start working on games.
To learn the SDK I read the book Beginning iPhone Development by Jeff LaMarche and Dave Mark. I took a week to go through that book and learn the basics of making apps.
I had already had ideas lined up that I wanted to work on. I ran them by my family. There were three that really stood out. One was a game my wife really liked and the other was Star Catch. I decided to try Star Catch because I thought I could get it out quicker than the other idea.
Star Catch did not require any fancy animations.
My first challenge was to figure out how I was going to write the game. I didn’t know if I had to use OpenGL or if I could use Quartz 2D. My initial tests showed that Quartz might be too slow. So I started reading OpenGL ES tutorials and I was on my way.
I struggled for a week trying to get the lasso part working in OpenGL ES. I tried different things but could not get a good prototype working.
Then I found cocos2d-iphone library. Cocos2d encapsulated a lot of OpenGL that I wouldn’t have to worry about. I believe using libraries like this is a huge time saver and you get the support from the community. Which means you can focus on making games and not creating the billionth game engine. I know there are some people too stupid to realize this and waste a lot of time telling everyone that they should write code using OpenGL and not use cocos2d or unity when they themselves can write code. Instead they get other people smarter than them to write it for them. (I have never used unity for any projects and probably won’t because of the cost).
Once I got acquainted with cocos2d I was up and running at the end of two and a half weeks. From there I coded non-stop any chance I had for another month and a half.
I will continue with this more later