14 DAY TRIAL // “Featuring a @SteveWoz intro, Tap, Move, Shake will show you how to make your own #iOS game,” reads the latest tweet from Apple through the @iBookstore Twitter handle.
The company run by Tim Cook seems eager to promote a book written by Todd Moore and published by O'Reilly Media, Inc. which acts as a complete do-it-yourself guide on how to make your game idea a reality for the iPhone and iPad.
“By developing a real game hands-on through the course of this book, you’ll get a thorough introduction to Xcode and Objective-C, while learning how to implement game logic, sophisticated graphics, game physics, sounds, and computer AI,” says O'Reilly Media.
According to the publisher, Moore taught himself how to create an iPhone game in a week. He had no previous knowledge of Apple’s development tools whatsoever, and now he is working full time as a smartphone games developer.
While his book doesn’t guarantee that you’ll roll out the next best thing to Angry Birds, the guide does promise to enable any coder to turn game ideas into real products, ready for the App Store.
One buyer posted a short review of the book after flipping through its pages and claimed “I found some real gems in this book and love the example of creating the old school game of Pong in only 20 lines of code.”
“It really illustrates how to keep things simple. The book also covers how to market your game which is important these days given how many apps are in the store. The foreword is by Steve Wozniak was a surprise because its not listed in the product description,” said the user, identified as AWESOMO-2000 on Apple’s App Store.
Another buyer, Bruce Sackett, says that the e-book moves a reader very quickly into developing simple games and that it includes a good discussion about adding sounds, and graphics using Adobe Fireworks.
The book requires iBooks 1.3.1 or later and iOS 4.3.3 or later.