Iphone Development requirements

Unity Engine
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1

I’m sorry if this question has already been asked, I couldn’t find a straight forward answer. I know you need a mac for the iOS addon, but I was wondering if you need the iOS addon to begin development of an iPhone game. I don’t own a mac, and I haven’t bought the addon, but I want to start work on a game. I would want to have the game at least a good ways developed before I throw down the $1000+ on the computer and addon (just in case the project fails). How far into development can I get on an iPhone game without a mac or the iPhone addon?

2

You don’t need a mac or an iphone to begin development at all. You need them to test and deploy to ios though. But for the most part, you can do your development on whatever you use now.

Important considerations:

  1. don’t expect desktop performance on mobiles. Use mobile shaders on the desktop as any good mobile shader worth it’s salt should work on pc, mac and mobile.

  2. you will need to emulate touches for now using keyboard and/or mouse.

  3. test early and test often for resolution independence. That means avoiding unity’s (existing 3.x - 4.0) gui.

If you keep those considerations in mind, the path of porting it will be as simple as just adding touch controls.

3

You can definitely start development on a PC. I did this with my iPhone game (worked on it for 6 months on my PC before I got a Mac). But you can’t test or deploy to your iOS device until you have a Mac to build from.

So while you CAN start development on your PC, the sooner you have a Mac and can actually test on your iOS device the better. Some issues will not become apparent until you have it running on an iOS device, and testing some things like iOS touch interfaces def require this.

4

What do you mean by can’t test or deploy to your IOS device , you can make an IOS build on your pc and transfer it on ex: your Ipad and test …no ?

i never actually tried but i just saw that you can’t make the build for IOS on PC , how do you go about making your build on a mac if you developped on pc do you require a 2nd license for making the build on a mac afterwards ?

5

No. You need Xcode, which only exists on OS X.

–Eric

6

Unity builds an XCode project from your iOS Unity project. All iOS projects are built and transfered to an iOS device via XCode (this is an Apple requirement). You can export your Unity project for XCode from a PC just fine. But Xcode is OSX only and you will have to load this in XCode on a Mac to actually deploy it to an iOS device.