Beginner Questions

tgran92

Forgive me if these questions are answered elsewhere but I have a few questions before I get started with my first project. I've browsed the forum, the FAQ, and google but still am not sure about these things:

1. To publish a game on iOS, do I need to develop the game on a Mac or just publish it on a Mac?
2. What resolution should my game be? The Windows default for iPhone landscape is 480x320 (original iPhone I believe), but tutorials I've seen on Youtube use 568x320 (iPhone 5?), but now with the iPhone 6 and 6+, is there a larger resolution I should work with?
3. I have access to a Mac, although it is my brother's and inconvenient for him if I use it constantly. Is it recommended I just use that to develop the entire game? Does the Mac version of GS have some extra tools or resources that the Windows version does not?
4. From doing some reading, I see that all graphics/images should be made in Photoshop 2x the size they will be in the game, right?
5. Any other things you think a newbie like myself should know before I dive in?

Thank you in advance for any help you guys are willing to give!

MentalDonkeyGames

1. You currently need a Mac to publish. You can build your game on windows and then publish on a mac.

2. That doesn´t matter. It all depends on how you design your game. If you make your artwork big enough it will scale nicely on higher resolution devices.

3. Mac version of creator currently has some features not available in the Windows version. GS is however working on a windows version that will be equal to the mac creator.

4. Yes. That is to support retina devices.

To my understanding, if you start to build your game in low resolution settings (i.e. iPhone Legacy) you should make the art 4x to support retina displays.

Hope this helps. Good luck and have fun!

jamie_c

1. You MUST publish from a Mac if you want to publish to the Apple App Store. You can develop on a PC though and then only publish from the Mac (see #3 below for more).

2. Depends on the platform you want to publish too. Sounds like you might be planning on a Universal app that covers all iOS devices though. In that case most users develop for the iPad platform and use the universal publish options of scale, stretch or letterbox for the other iOS devices when publishing.

3. If you have access to a Mac and PC I think most people would suggest just developing on the Mac. Most of the tutorials you will find are Mac based and when it comes to finally publishing your games it will be much easier. Some PC users have reported issues with the conversion between PC and Mac files.

4. If you are planning on publishing to Apple devices, yes.

5. Just spend as much time learning as you can upfront before diving into a giant project that you're not ready for yet. Start small and work up.

And welcome!

tgran92

Thank you very much for the quick responses. Love to see that this forum has an active and helpful community!

So while it doesn't really matter what resolution I start working with and it really just depends on how large my artwork is so that it scales properly, should I just work with an iPad platform like jamie_c recommends? I feel like that's significantly harder to create graphics for considering how large that resolution is.

jamie_c

@tgran92, you're welcome. My typical workflow for graphics is to create everything I can in a vector art program like Adobe Illustrator first and then only make any tweaks in Photoshop before exporting for use in Gamesalad. By starting with vector art you can scale up or down endlessly without affecting the quality of the images.