Request for Info: Right Fit, First Steps and Tutorials

Holden47

Hi All - I used to run an indie record label with iTunes as my distributor; now starting an indie mobile app shop; I'm totally new to programming (except for COBOL about 20 years ago) and no experience with app dev frameworks or engines. My initial focus will be on games for kids via iOS. A couple questions:

1. Is Gideros a good choice for such a newbie as myself, or do I need to start with learning Objective C; or alternatively start with a more basic framework/engine like Gamesalad?

2. If Gideros, then where do I begin? Do I first need to learn Lua, or just jump right into learning Gideros directly?

3. Any recommendations on audio or video tutorials? I have a 1 hour commute each way for my day job so would like to spend those 2 hours/day listening and learning on how to use Gideros (and/or Lua)

Thanks in advance for your help.

-H47

talis

First of all i would like to welcome you @Holden47
Now let me try to answer your questions from my point of view:

1-Gideros is really so much simple. But do not forget that game programming sometimes need some foundation in algorithms and math. But i can easily say that this SDK is one of the easiest to learn.

2-Learning Lua is important but not deeply in the beginning. Learn the basics of it the logic. Than just jump into examples.

3-There is great saying that: "Nothing is impossible if you can divide the job into manageable pieces."
So i advice you to start as simple as it is possible. Like:
-Showing an image on screen
-Moving image with touch
-Playing sound on touch
etc etc...
Than try to combine 2-3 of these small things together and ta da you have it:D
I suggest you to really follow forum , because i can easily say that this is the friendliest community i have ever entered.
Meantime do not forget to take a look at these:
- http://www.giderosmobile.com/gideros-academy/
- http://www.giderosmobile.com/documentation/getting_started.html

- http://appcodingeasy.com/Gideros-Mobile (**Highly adviced)

In addition also look the built-in examples that comes with the gideros sdk.


Final words:
Never ever hesitate to ask in forum anything that troubles you about Gideros or even about something else in Relax Cafe part of the forum:)

Welcome onboard again.

OZApps

@H47,
the choice of framework - Gideros is a good one as it sits well positioned for a beginner as well as offering the functionality to extend it to a professional level with all the bells and whistles as expected from Objective-C. You have been a COBOL developer, so you should be fine with the logic part of things. It would help to understand Lua and the equivalence so that you can get things done.

You can start with the Gideros Samples and then work backwards to split them up into smaller manageable portions as @talis suggested, in the end it will all be a series of functions that you will need to display or hide the images, play or stop sound, handle touches, etc.

If you do get stuck there is a lot of help available on these forums, folks here are not techies just showing off their skills, they are intelligent normal people that discuss almost anything even non-related to development.

Though this would sound like self promotion, you can try my book "Learn Lua for iOS Game Development" from Apress from http://www.apress.com/9781430246626 it should help you get up to speed with Lua and developing using Lua based frameworks, especially Gideros.

techdojo

@Holden47 - hi and welcome to the forum, as everyone else suggested Gideros would be an ideal choice for your projects.

Learning (especially with Gideros) is all about diving in a trying stuff out, look at the examples, changing things, see what happens etc.

Lua is an easy language to get in to but can contain some gotcha's in addition to @OZApps book you can look at Beginning Lua Programming (by some guy with a daft haircut) and the Lua "bible" (see Lua.org).

The main thing to watch for is the fact that variables are all untyped and that if you misspell a name the interpreter will assume your talking about a global that doesn't exist yet (and promptly create it).

The Gideros display system is very simple (and yet very powerful), most people use the Sprite type to represent a "container group" into which you can add many children and "Bitmap" or "Shape" objects to represent actual things you want to draw on screen (although as they both inherit from "Sprite" technically you can think of anything as a "container group".

The key to animation is to add an "enterFrame" listener function to an object (Sprite, Bitmap, Shape etc), this function is then called either 30 or 60 times per second and allows you to run your "game loop", again looking at some of the examples provided should illustrate this further.

Hope this enough to get you started.

Jon...

Scouser

Hi @Holden47 and welcome to the community. I always find the easiest way to learn is to take a working example and tinker with it.

Change something, see what it does. Change something else, see what that does. Eventually you get a handle on what you need to write / change to get the code to do what you want.

If you don't understand why something happens then you can always either find the answer already here on the forum, in the Gideros Academy (or any of the other links in the yellow band at the top of this page), or if all else fails ask here in the forum and I'm sure someone will be along with an answer before you know it.

Holden47

@talis, @OZApps, @techdojo, @Scouser - thank you so much for the welcome, and thanks for the super awesome advice! I'm going to definitely jump in with examples and also check out the suggested references.

@OZApps - I was actually on Amazon last night and already pre-ordered your book, before I even read your suggestion...can't wait to read it! I also ran across your website too while searching the net for some answers... some really great articles!!

@techdojo - I'm going to head back over to Amazon to check out the book you referenced, thanks!

@talis - I'll check out those links you provided and will try the small steps you suggested, thank you!

@Scouser - I definitely appreciate the welcome and encouragement to ask questions on the forum, thank you!! I'm sure I'll have a couple to ask along the way

-H47