IOS development with Windows?

Hello everyone,

I recently discovered Unity and find it amazing. I want to get into IOS development and am thinking of creating a small simple game for iphones. The problem is that I have a Windows 7 64 bit PC and not a Mac, although I do have a virtual machine with Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10) on it. I looked at the Unity manual and they have some steps on how to start IOS development with Unity, but I assume that is for Mac computers. Is there any way I can create a project with Unity on my Windows and then import it to my virtual machine? Also is there a way that I wouldn’t have to pay for an Apple developer license until the last minute just to make sure I complete the app before I spend money?

Thanks!

The majority of the work done in Unity is platform agnostic; that is, it doesn’t matter what your target platform is. You can develop 95% of the game without directly touching iOS (including the Apple developer program.)

That said, I really don’t recommend a virtual machine for deploying to iOS. Everyone I know who develops their games on Windows still use a Mac for building the final app.

But in the steps of the Unity Manual, it says that I would need the Apple SDK. Do you think i would need that for a basic app? And thank you for replying!

Sorry for all the questions but I have one more! Would it be better to script in C# or JavaScript for the app?

C# is better; you could use JavaScript but there are some tricky things for compatibility with iOS (eg. gotta use pragma strict).

I’m assuming those steps (you really should provide a link to exactly what you’re talking about) are for building the app from Unity. That process does require the iOS SDK, but you could develop the majority of your game before getting to that point. You can’t actually play on your phone, only within Unity, but you could develop everything within Unity and then build for iOS at the end. This isn’t the most recommended way of doing things (it’s a good idea to test on device in case you have too many polygons, etc.) but you could.

On your OSX machine you need to install Unity again. Then simply copy the project from Windows to Mac and open it and then you can export to iOS.

When developing on Windows you can NOT export to iOS or Mac.

When developing on OSX you can NOT export to Windows.

In both cases you need to to copy the project over to each machine and then export appropriate.

That’s incorrect; I do that routinely. But that’s also not relevant to this question, so whatever.