Writing Game Center Apps in iOS

Creating Game Center Accounts

Problem

You know you need to set something up before being able to use Game Center but you are not quite sure what you need to do.

Solution

Use the iOS Simulator’s built-in Game Center app to set up your Game Center accounts as demonstrated here.

Discussion

Each player is identified by an account on Game Center. Each account is linked to an email address. Game Center accounts run on either the production server or the sandbox server. The production server is the server that hosts Game Center apps when they go live on the App Store. The sandbox server is the server that hosts Game Center apps before they go to production, such as apps that are run on the iOS Simulator so that developers can test whether the app is working fine before they submit it to the App Store. All code that you write for your Game Center apps will work on the production server if they work fine on the sandbox server.

To test your Game Center apps, you must create Game Center accounts. Each account is associated with just one of the two servers just discussed. Since we want to test our apps before submitting them to the store, we must create a few Game Center sandbox players. Please take the following steps to create Game Center sandbox players:

1. Navigate to Gmail and create a few email addresses. I created three email addresses so that I could have three players on sandbox Game Center servers. I recommend giving them similar names because managing and remembering them can be a hard task ...