So I am watching through the wwdc videos for iOS 7 and there are some interesting things in here.
Apple has added something called sprite kit. This is not a complete game engine for 2D games, but it gets your pretty far. Apple appears to be heading the direction of implementing their own native frameworks for games.
SceneKit appears to still only be available on OSX, but that will probably come to iOS at some point and be a potential foundation for 3D games. SceneKit is a high level API for constructing 3D environments to be rendered with OpenGL if you aren’t familiar. These two things do make me wonder if we are going to see a 3D game engine made entirely by apple emerge out of their API’s at some point. I think this is a possibility.
The next interesting things is native integration of javascript interpretation. There is now an iOS API that you can feed javascript and have it interpret it, in a way that I would assume is highly optimized by apple. This made me curious to know if perhaps this could be leveraged in Unity for if we ever wanted to be able to have an interpreted language on iOS.
Next, there appears now to be a standardized game controller API. I’ve been saying for a while that Apple needs to make a standardized game controller to become a larger player in the games market. They aren’t making an actual controller, this is just a game controller API, but just having a standardized API for game controllers is pretty significant in this regard. I think this will open a pretty big door.
There is also a new ‘nearby multipeer’ API. Which just automatically seeks out nearby phones and appears to automatically connect and let you send data. This may be an interesting dynamic for some game designs.