7

I've got some experience producing Flash games, and for all Flash's faults I find the designer/developer workflow pretty decent.

I can set up a template FLA with placeholder movieclips and code to that independently of a designer/animator doing their thing. When it comes time for integration, I can either compile their animations into my project by using a SWC or by loading SWF's at runtime.

I've had a quick look, but I can't see any tools that offer a similar workflow for iOS game development. Could anyone producing iOS games shed any light on how they're handling designer/animator/developer workflow?

Cameron Yule
  • 93
  • 5

3 Answers3

4

Unity for iPhone is the most complete pipeline and toolset I've found. It is natively a 3D engine, but can be made to do 2D as well. For 2D, I've paired Unity with SpriteManager2 which is an excellent third party tool and library.

A warning, however - it is still unclear if Unity projects will be allowed on the iPhone in the future due to Apple's new terms of service. Unity is working hard to ensure that it will be OK, but who knows with Apple's track record.

There is also Unity for Android coming later this year so if you build a game for iPhone and Unity gets banned by Apple, you could still put it on Android.

Pixelator
  • 156
  • 3
  • Thanks Pixelator. We've been doing some R&D with Unity lately and been impressed by what it has to offer. I’ll be sure to check out SpriteManager as we're likely to do 2D as well as 3D games.

    I'm beginning to think that those who aren't using Unity may simply be creating and managing individually animated bitmap sprites (or sprite sheets).

     – Cameron Yule Jul 26 '10 at 08:42
  • fyi this answer is really old and slightly out of date. Not that it's become "wrong", but by now we know for sure Unity is still on iPhone, Unity has been on Android for years, and there is built-in 2D functionality now. – jhocking Sep 07 '14 at 20:53
1

We have had quite a bit of success using Unity3D's iPhone Engine. Unity has a similar workflow to Flash and we have found that all members of the team make the transition fairly well.

You might want to check out Unity for Flash Developers

bowditch
  • 111
  • 2
0

I was in your same situation. As a 2D guy I really have a deep fear of huge IDE with unlimited options for the 3D world (Maya, 3DStudio). Lately I ended up coding with frameworks (Cocos2D, SpriteKit).

But in your case, I highly recommend you to take a look into SpriteBuilder. It's the most Flash alike for iOS 2D game development right now. You will find it really easy and familiar out of the box.

Philip Allgaier
  • 2,863
  • 4
  • 25
  • 35
Juan Pedro Lozano
  • 1