Monday, February 11, 2008 @ 3:47 PM

Though I don't frequent other iPhone development type blogs much, I will say that the ones I have checked out skimp on the information you really want. They'll cover mundane issues like how to hide Safari's address bar, or how to change your wallpaper, or how to create a web clip bookmark... you know... beginner's stuff. What? That's all that we've been posting? Uhhh... ummmm... well, I guess it's time to up the education.

Over the next two weeks we're going to walk you through the development of a complete and working game for the iPhone. Not a stupid "move-around-the-pieces-of-this-image-and-try-to-put-them-in-order" game. We're going to build a fully functional crossword puzzle game. We'll discuss the best way to approach design and usability, provide coding tips (as well as some source code), and suggest solutions to many of the obstacles you will face along the way. So, without further ado, here is Part 1 of our ten part series.

Part 1: Things to Keep In Mind

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when considering iPhone game development. The most important is that iPhone developers currently do not have access to many of the usability features that make the iPhone great -- things like pinch, expand, slide, drag, drop, etc. That may change when the SDK is announced later this month, but for now all we have is press (click).

Additionally, all of the applications must be built in Safari. Don't get me wrong, I for one am more than happy to use Safari as my development environment. After all, HTML/Javascript development is what I know. It's what I've spent the last 10 years working with. So I know how to do really amazing things with that medium. Still, Safari on the iPhone is less responsive than it is on your Mac or PC. For instance, there is a lag between when you press something on the page and when you can press something else on the page. The lag is only about a second, but it should be kept in mind when you begin thinking about the type of game that you want to create. Because of the lag, slower-paced games make more sense on the iPhone. Therefore developing a puzzle game for this tutorial was a no brainer. After all, there's not much need to race your way through a crossword puzzle.

Besides the fact that a crossword puzzle was a slower-paced game, this type of game also provided some interesting usability dilemmas, but we'll get into those tomorrow. We'll also discuss design considerations tomorrow. For now, take a look at the near-finished design below. Though I've started some of the development of this game, there is much yet to still do so things may change over the next two weeks.


I originally got the idea for this game after seeing the daily puzzle on USA Today's site, so it made sense to try and repurpose the online version of their game in an iPhone format. DO NOT get all of your game ideas from copyright sources. I'm simply doing this because though I want to code and design the game, I don't want to create each puzzle myself, so I'm going to use the XML feed that their Flash game uses in order to pull individual puzzles.

That's all for today. Feel free to email us at ask@iphoneminds.com with questions or comments regarding game development. Come back tomorrow when we'll discuss design considerations.

// Ryan Jennings

Labels: crossword, game, how to, iphone development