iPhone Game Development

3D Game Design

As we did in the preceding chapter, we will want to specify a game design before we implement our game.

Let’s create a flight simulation game where the goal is for the player to race through a course of hoops as fast as he can. We will use the iPhone’s accelerometer (or “tilt sensor” if you prefer) to control the flight since that will translate well to the feeling of flying. We will also provide a slider bar on the touch screen to provide control over the ship’s thrust velocity. Figure 5-1 shows the game concept.

Figure 5-1. Game concept

Graphics

We need a 3D model for our ship, and the rings we’ll fly through. We will need a skybox to represent the environment we are flying in. And just to enhance visual realism, we will develop a particle system to show the vapor trail as our ship is flying about.

In addition to the 3D scene, we will also want some 2D elements to represent our heads-up display (HUD). We want to display a clock showing how much time the player is taking, and we will need to show the thruster control in 2D as well.

Ship

We need a 3D model for our ship. Fortunately, plenty of places on the Web provide free models for things such as this. We found a model at http://www.3Dxtras.com.

It’s not the right format, but we can use the PVRT plug-in for 3ds Max to export the model as a .pod file. In addition to saving the shape of the model, the .pod file will also store ...