iPhone Game Development - Chris Craft [62]
Here's another idea for a creating one possible version of a real-time strategy game and how it might work on the iPhone. The player sees an open area in the center of the screen that is surrounded by a black fog all the way around the edge of the screen. This fog prevents a player from seeing any area that has not been explored. This matches real life, because until you explore an area you do not know what it contains. This area is just a small part of the entire area that the player can explore.
The game world could be much taller and wider than what the player sees. In the top-right corner of the screen there is a mini-map that shows the player the entire playing area. At the bottom of the screen there are command and production controls that the player can use to create new units and buildings. Take a look at Figure 5.4 to see a prototype of this user interface.
FIGURE 5.3
Fantasy memory mock-up
FIGURE 5.4
Fantasy real-time strategy mock-up
Tip
Always do a quick prototype of the application user interface, even if it's on the back of a napkin. This helps to weed out bad ideas early in the design process.
The player is in control of a new village of either humans or possibly elves. But the player is not alone in this world. The land is also occupied by tribes of terrible trolls, or possibly some ornery orcs. Either way, the only thing the other occupants of this land want more than to see the humans leave their land is to have them for dinner. The player's goal is to help his people first survive, and then to thrive in their new homeland. To do this he will need to take steps to defend the human's land, explore surrounding lands, and eventually attack enemies and remove their threat to his people once and for all.
The Lost Garden
The Lost Garden (http://lostgardencom) is an amazing blog devoted to indie game developers. Not only does it have a wealth of great essays on game development, there's also a large number of free game graphics. The site belongs to Daniel Cook, who lists his occupation as Delighter. And we think you'll agree he is good at what he does. Here you can find a great set of game tiles for a 2-D RPG game. This set includes wilderness tiles, building interior tiles, and exterior village building tiles. There are also graphic sets from many games Daniel has worked on in the past, including Tyrian, Sinistar, and Hard Vacuum.
One last graphics set you might want to take note of is PlanetCute. PlanetCute was designed to be useful to the widest range of developers for the widest range of game genres. This graphics set is available as both vectors and bitmaps. Vectors can be resized freely but usually have to be converted before using in a game. Bitmaps can usually be used directly, but editing them can cause a loss of quality.
99 Designs
99 Designs (http://99designscom) bills itself as “a thriving community of nearly 30,000 designers.” While most of the listings on 99 Designs are for logos, business cards, and Web sites, that's not all they are designing these days. Many of the icons used by iPhone applications were originally created by a designer found at 99 Designs. And many of these applications even had their user interfaces designed at 99 Designs.
Not surprisingly, if you compare modern Web site design with the iPhone applications being created today, you will find the same kind of quality, variety, and attention to detail in both. Most Web sites are first designed in graphics software and then developers convert them to HTML. A developer can take a similar process to convert graphics to a user interface in Xcode.
99 Designs is not free, but the price is affordable to many. You post on 99 Designs what you need designed. As of this writing there is a fee of $39 to do this. Then you assign a prize to your design contest, generally ranging from $100 to $600 depending on what you're looking