At the moment I am looking to create a game for the iphone, however i only have the free version of Unity and without sounding cheap i don’t really want to purchase the iphone licence until i know that the game is up and running.
Are there many differences that help in the development on iphone in the iphone unity or is it only the compiler and deployment that differs from the free untiy.
So for instance if i had the main game running in the free unity how easy would it then be to open up that project in iphone unity and add the iphone features and deploy it?
You can do your game for a big part in unity free eventually and you could just export a package into unity iphone later ( unity 3.0 make things way simpler for this process with unified editor )
the problem with that is that you may want to keep in mind the iphone “specific” to make things in a way it will already perform correctly once on the device, so think about batching, optimize your code for it etc …
at the end you must test it on device and see how all that run , because the info on your game perfs you will get from desktop won’t help you really.
also don’t forget that you will need to register to apple dev program to be able to deploy on the device even for test your game
Theoretically, adapting your game to iPhone input can be done within a day or two.
Practically, chances are high that your game will crawl at terribly slow framerates and you will have to adapt models, textures, code, sound, pretty much everything to the limited capabilities of iOS hardware.
The thing is that you have no chance of knowing that your game is up and running on the platform you are aiming for, unless you use the tools needed for that platform, and that’s an Apple Developer license, Unity iPhone license, Mac hardware to install Apples SDK and Unity iPhone, and an iOS Testdevice.