Why Program Games for the iPhone

 Why Program Games for the iPhone

 Why Program Games for the iPhone

 At first glance, the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad don't appear as if your typical gaming device. there's no joystick, no gamepad, not even any buttons (other than the house button, the on/off switch, and also the volume control). And yet games are the leading source of sales within the App Store. 

A full 28% of iPad users reported in a very recent study by Resolve research that they use the device primarily for gaming. 

This can be all the more astonishing when one considers that games compose only 17% of the App Store. The net catalog Apptism, which offered an almost complete Internet listing of the contents of the App Store (before it had been bought out by ngmoco), showed 2 years ago a complete of 213,292 apps, of which only 36,008 were games. 

Meanwhile, the quantity of apps, per Apple, has grown to over half 1,000,000, and each month users download over a billion apps onto their personal devices. 

Thus, the App Store still offers as compared to other mobile operating systems both the most important selection and an awfully active download community.

* The absence of classical input options certainly complicates the playing of typical genre games as represented by, for instance, Jump’n’Runs or Shoot’em Ups. 

Unless the touch-sensitive surface of iOS devices offers the chance of emulating the missing joystick or gamepad: Both variants are used, additionally to others, within the C64 emulator from Manomio. 

Particularly for brand new editions * For comparison: The Flurry Tech Blog gives only 350,000 available apps for the Android market for October 2011.

Upper row (left to right): Magnetic Baby (Bravery), R-Type (Electronic Arts), Spirits (Spaces of Play). of older retro titles from the 1980s, which frequently require the player’s rapid and precise reaction, the touch control remains inferior to the controls borrowed from the arcade: it's too notchy, too imprecise, and, additionally, a part of the screen is obscured by the virtual control. 

But it's precise during this shortcoming that the challenge lies: The operating concept of iPhone & Co. forces game developers to think in new ways and requires new ideas and innovative control options. 

There are by now lots of successful examples that show how the touch display and motion sensor is used for games.

* Since games need to be tailored to the iPhone iOS, the platform unavoidably provides for brand spanking new and unique gaming experiences that can't be readily transferred to other gaming consoles or, conversely, adapted from other platforms to the iPhone.