iPhone Game Develop doubt

Archived Forums Questions & Answers
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I have some questions of iPhone Development on Unity.

I know that the only way to build an iPhone Game is using a Mac.
But can I program using C# ? Or I need to use Objective C on XCode ?

And can I create the game on Windows using Visual C# and only use the Mac to build ?

Thanks for the help =)

I guess, I had another account though.

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3 Answers

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You can use C#, UnityScript, or boo for all platforms, so yes, you can make your game on a windows machine for example using Visual Studio for scripting and then build it on a Mac for iOS.

However, I’d advise you to test it early on the actual target device - there are always issues you might not have thought of.

Good luck!

3

Yes you’ll need a Mac to make the XCode project that will be used to make the app and run it on your iDevice.

Yes, you can code in c#. There is no need to know ObjectiveC, but if you know a little of that language it might help you down the road. If this was a job spec, then ObjectiveC would be “nice to have”.

You can create the game logic using Unity running on a PC. I usually compare making a game for the iOS on a PC to driving a car. If you want to race a F1 car in the next Grand Prix you could practice driving your own car around the city where you live. You’ll know a lot about clutch, changing gears, and when to brake. Driving an F1 car is exactly like driving a regular car. Except that the details are very very different. If you make your iOS app on a PC, then you’ll not be able to test the touch interface, you’ll not know the frame rate, or performance, or memory requirements, or effects of transparency, etc.

I’d finish by saying if you want to make an iOS app, and do it well, then use a Mac for the development, and buy each of the iOS devices where you want the game to run, so you can tweak the game to suit the very different capabilities of these devices.

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Unity iOS will auto-translate all your C# into “iOS language.” Likewise, it will turn all your jpegs into the special iOS format, and so on. Your $400 buys you all that with a single button press.

Then it will bring up XCode, compile and do everything else just as if you had written in XCode in the first place. So, you will need to know a little about using Xcode (but not much,) and will have to follow all of the usual steps to develop for iOS.

I think one of the reasons Unity has been successful is that they pay attention to what actual game developers need (for example, not having to do a major rewrite for each platform.) Look at the reams of bug fixes for Android. Boring nit-picky stuff, but a big deal if you’re an Android developer.