Writing Game Center Apps in iOS

Setting Up Game Center for an iOS App

Problem

You want to be able to connect to the Game Center servers in your iOS apps.

Solution

You need to create your app in iTunes Connect and also set your app’s bundle identifier both in iTunes Connect and your app’s info.plist file as demonstrated in the Discussion section.

Discussion

In Creating Game Center Accounts, we created sandbox Game Center accounts using the Game Center iOS App, which is installed on all instances of iOS Simulator. That was the first piece of the puzzle. The next is setting up our iOS App with Game Center using iTunes Connect. This might confuse you a bit at first. The linchpin is to create an app in Xcode and give it a bundle identifier. For instance, here is the bundle identifier that I am using:

com.pixolity.testgame

Setting the identifier in your app bundle won’t do the trick by itself. You have to set up your application on iTunes Connect. Set the app’s bundle identifier on iTunes Connect to the same identifier you set in your application bundle in Xcode.

We’ll handle these tasks in this section, but we will not upload the app to iTunes Connect. By following the procedure in this section, you’ll set up your app on iTunes in the state of Prepare for Upload. You will be able to access Game Center for the app. But because it is not actually uploaded to iTunes Connect, your Game Center connections will run on the sandbox environment. The same code will run on the production server in a later stage, after your app has been ...