How to write a great 2D iphone game in a few days

Further to my last post, I thought I'd share some great resources I've found for developing 2D games in virtually no time.

cocos2d for iPhone is a good starting point, especially if you base your game on an existing code base such as TweeJump (see previous post). This gives you something working in minutes.

For PoodleJump, I needed to enhance and customise the game with 2 key elements which aren't that easy to generate from scratch: images and sounds. TweeJump has no sounds which is a real shame, and by adding some carefully chosen sounds, I think I've really improved the enjoyment factor. Also, simply by changing a few small images, I've got a completely new game.

For Mac users (and that means all iPhone developers, for now), GarageBand is a great tool. I used it to generate a fairly cool soundtrack for TractorBeams and DarkFlow (ok, so I need to produce some new tunes). For someone as musically challenged as me, it's surprisingly easy to put loops together to produce something quite professional sounding. And yes, the loops are royalty free so the produced song can be used in commercial projects.

But GarageBand also has hundreds of great quality sound effects. I also highly recommend freeSFX for free samples.

Note: for short sound effects, you really want to save in WAV format (iTunes can convert it for you) and use AudioServicesPlaySystemSound to play it, which results in no lag or graphical glitches, unlike AVAudioPlayer.

What about images? There's lots of sites out there but a particularly good one I found was graphicsfactory. They have a large quantity of quality images and offer one free download per day. Perfect for my limited requirements.

Gimp of course is great for tweaking images and putting texture maps together. It's also cross platform and free.

The end result was a complete game in about 7 days with zero cost. Let's see how much revenue those iAds generate.