Joseph Burchett

After diving into the world of Apple I must say I am loving it a lot more then Windows. So being a developer of course id want to try and start making some IPhone/IPod games. Only problem is that I found Objective-C (the programming language used to develop applications for IPhone/IPod) to be one of the most bizarre programming languages I have seen yet. I found it be very unsatisfying and frustrating ( I won’t get into why, that’s for another post ). So of course I went looking for alternatives, and this is what I found!

SDL 1.3: This is a fantastic and very popular free C++ media library used to make games.
Pros:

1. Latest version now supports IPhone/IPod development
2. Contains demos showing how to get started in the svn
3. Get help on how to get started with how to use SDL from the amazing community and wealth of tutorials and knowledge from over the years of SDL’s development
4. Allows for experience SDL users to get up and started with Iphone/Ipod games really quickly

Cons:

1. Requires that you know C++ (that can be bad or good depending on how you look at it)
2. Because you can not statically link third party libraries when creating an IPhone/IPod application, you first need to buy a license. I will not say how much exactly but I will tell you it is a bit pricey, considering you need a license for every app you make
3. SDL 1.3 is still pretty new and has lots of bugs in it

Phone Gap: Is an open source solution that allows you to create IPhone/IPod games using web technologies such as CSS, Javascript, etc.
Pros:

1. If you come from an AJAX (or related) web developer background you can easily utilize your web development skills to build IPhone/IPod games.
2. It is free and open source
3. Offers good tutorials and wiki
4. Already has a bunch of good 3rd party web api’s (scroll to the very bottom) that you can use

Cons:

1. Because it is a 3rd party technology a lot of phone gap developers have had their games reject from the app store
2. Phone Gap is still a pretty new technology so even though they have tutorials and a wiki I found it rather hard to find a place to get started, and almost no google search results on the topic.

Unity 3D:A very powerful 3D game editor that lets you create games for multiple platforms
Pros:

1. Lets you take full advantage of the IPhone/IPod capabilities by providing you a very slick and initiative graphical user interface for creating 3D (or 2D) games for the IPhone/IPod.
2. No hassle, just build your game with the editor, click a button and boom! You are good to go.
3. Build your game for the IPhone/IPod, tweak it a bit and then can easily deploy that same game on a variety of other platforms Untiy 3D supports; pc, Wii (separate license), etc.
4. Lots of tutorials on how to use Unity on the website.
5. Supports variety of languages to code in (C#, boo, javascript…)

Con:

1. It requires a separate license to be able to create IPhone/IPod games, which doesn’t cost to much but still… It’s not free
2. Documentation seems to lead more into Javascript support then the others
3. Could improve the intellisense when doing your scripting

Torque game engine: Is another game engine that includes an editor to help speed up the development of your games
Pros:
1. Provides you an editor so you can get things done rather quickly
2. You can use the built in scripting engine; Torque script to get things done
3. Garage Games has put a lot of effort into supplying the developer with good documentation, tools, content, and community support
4. You can demo the engine, before using it
5. Excellent support and quick responses on the forums

Cons:
1. I do not believe currently they support 3D development for IPhone/IPod development (I could be wrong on this, but didn’t see it)
2. This is merely my own opinion, but I found Torque to be a bit all over the place, wasn’t the easiest to get going, but this was with an older version of Torque so things could have changed. A lot of the code I found a bit confusing, and at times hard to work with.
3. Really need to spend a lot of time with the engine to learn the in and outs of it…
4. Although they do supply you with a lot of very well thought out documentation, tools, and community, in order to get to the good stuff you have to pay (special board access, etc).

Haxe: It is a an open source language that compiles to many different client/server side web based languages
Pros:
1. A C++ language extension was created with the help of SDL, to allow users to work in Haxe and compile to C++ code that can be run on the IPhone/IPod
2. All the power of Haxe at your finger tips (almost… sorta)
3. You get to to use Haxe?
4. Seriously why are you not using Haxe, go try it!

Cons:
1. This C++ extension is still in it’s very, very early stage of development, probably not very stable
2. Doesn’t really have any real support, tutorials… It’s still just a proof of concept right now…
3. It has some dependencies with SDL

Corona: Seems to be another SDK you can use to build native IPhone/IPod applications… Can’t really find to much info then that.
Pros
1. “Web developers feel at home in our environment; it’s like ActionScript or JavaScript but designed from the ground up for the iPhone.” Hm, interesting, well I do like myself some Action Script
2. They are offering what is called an “early adopter” program… So I am assuming you sign up and they send you the SDK to tinker with?

Cons
1. Well, they don’t seem to be saying to much other then how wonderful they feel they’re product is… Eh
2. They are asking for a lot of information for that “early adopter” program

xmlvm: “XMLVM can be used to cross-compile a Java application to Objective-C.”
Pros
1. You can code in java
2. Hm, seems pretty geeky… I approve! Sides seems google likes it to…

Cons
1. If you don’t like Java, not for you
2. Probably isn’t fully featured yet, meaning probably can’t do everything objective-C can when developing an IPhone/IPod application…
3. Haven’t’ tried it yet, but doesn’t seem like it be to easy to setup, could be wrong though.

MonoTouch: “MonoTouch allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications that run on the iPhone and can take advantage of the iPhone APIs as well as reusing both code and libraries that have been built for .NET as well as existing skills.”

Pros:
1. Allows .Net C# developers to build IPhone/IPod applications
2. Doing limited beta in August and releasing in September

Cons:
1. Uh, hm, I suppose this suck if you don’t know .Net and C#

Here is another post I got off of twitter, some one else suggested a bunch of other solutions for making IPhone/IPod games without actually using Objective-C
http://diamondtearz.org/lists/alternatives-to-objective-c-for-iphone-application-development/

I am in know way an expert in all of these alternative ways of developing games for the IPhone/IPod, but I have investigated them enough to get a somewhat decent impression from each of them. Each of these “pros” and “cons” are merely what I found to be the most interesting about each technology, so take it all with a grain of salt. Hopefully these sources will help those out their who have come from a very C/C++ centric (like me; C++, C#, Java, Php, etc) world, that they don’t have to suck it up and use objective-C, there are alternatives (thank god). So yeah, hopefully some one found this helpful OH if anyone finds anymore 3rd party libraries for developing IPhone/IPod applications please mention it!

Just so people know I do not hate objective-C I just found it to be so very strange in the way it does some things, and not very fun to work in, but to each there own