iPhone Game Development - Chris Craft [60]
You can even consider the iPhone App Store itself to see this effect. By having an App Store on the iPhone, Apple created a single place where there are a huge number of iPhone applications and a lot of competition to create iPhone applications. On many other phones, you either cannot install applications or you have to find each application yourself on the Internet.
When each application is located at something that is similar to the lone car dealership, you can see the difference competition makes. On many phones, fewer than one in ten people have ever added an application to their phone. On the iPhone, we suspect nine out of ten people have installed as many as ten or more applications.
Some of the most popular applications on the iPhone are the ones with the most competition. The more choices people have, the more likely they will find the product that has exactly what they want. When people find a product that is exactly what they want, they usually buy it. And this is exactly what you want.
You want competition for your applications for the same reason: It will make your products better, and better products sell better. Obviously, with more competition comes more risks—but also more rewards. Learn from your competition, because they will learn from you.
Creating sprites
When it comes to games, one of the key elements that contributes to excitement and enjoyment of the game is the game's graphics. Figuring out that people want great game graphics is easy, but creating them can be another story. Some people are great programmers and some people are great artists. Very few people are both. Not only that, but programmers tend to be especially challenged at creating quality graphics. Many times game graphics are referred to as game sprites. There's even a term for it: “programmer's art.”
There is probably no worse insult an artist can receive than to have someone refer to a piece of his work as programmer's art. That said, programmer's art is great for temporary graphics, storyboarding, and prototyping. Unless you are both a programmer as well as an artist, creating great graphics will always be an area you will have to pay extra attention to.
What about the 99 percent of programmers who are not both great programmers and great artists? How do they create great game art? That's a good question. You can, of course, buy game graphics. Either you can pay a designer to create custom graphics for your application, or you can try to find a collection of game graphics already made that you can use. However, paying for custom graphics can be quite expensive. Many new iPhone developers would have a hard time affording this. But finding a collection of ready-to-use game graphics may not be possible.
So you may find yourself thrust upon the horns of a dilemma. You need great graphics. You cannot create them yourself, you cannot afford to have someone else create them for you, and you cannot find a cheap alternative to use instead. Sometimes you have to settle for the next best thing and hope that it is good enough. You are bound to run up against this wall or another just like it when first starting out.
The important thing to remember is that your application is not carved in stone. The second version of your application can be much better than the first version of your application, and so on. A great feature of the iPhone App Store is that iPhone applications can be automatically upgraded. It's important to always do your best to produce a quality piece of work, but perfection may have to wait for another day. Good software released today is always better than perfect software never released, and you never release bad software. Remember, sometimes it takes years to become an “overnight” success.
Note
Thomas Edison had to endure as many as 10,000 failures before he perfected a long-lasting light bulb. Hopefully, it will not take you as many tries to create