iPhone board game: OpenGL ES or CoreGraphics? [closed]

Answer 1

You might also check out cocos2d for iphone - it's a pretty full-featured 2d game library; it's got tilemaps, sprites, parallax, scheduling, etc. I'm using it for my game, and it's helped me quite a bit.

http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/

Answer 2

OpenGL. It'll be worth it in the long run, and I thought the learning curve was even easier that CoreGraphics for 2D sprite stuff.

Answer 3

OpenGL, if done right, will probably look better. However, my understanding is that it's a heck of a lot harder than CoreGraphics if you don't know how it works.

However, if you're unfamiliar with it, CoreGraphics is easier to pick up. I don't know very much about OpenGL, so when I was writing a game, I did it in CoreGraphics and it turned out pretty good.

Answer 4

If you are not very performance hungry, which a board game probably isn’t, go with CoreGraphics. You get the luxury of working at a higher abstraction level and You also get some things you would have to write by hand, for example animations. (P.S. I assume You are talking about 2D.)

Answer 5

For this one definitely core graphics and core animation. Jeff LeMarche has a sample template for a Black Jack game on his blog - I just finished a suduko puzzle this approach. As far as cocos2D which I am using for a platform game - openGL would not improve or enhance the graphics - it will definitely not make the graphics look better - you can photoshop your heart out on this one and feel safe and know it will look great. Learning Cocos2D for this is too much overhead - same with learning openGL ES - just use core graphics and get it out there. As far as knowing openGL ES for the future - of course - but you should understand Apple's "core" before attempting these.

Answer 6

If your perspective is mostly top-view, the user view is at a fixed position, and you don't need runtime texture mapping or special lighting, then core graphics will be easier. Otherwise I'd go with OpenGL (or one of those third-party game-building kits like Unity that make it simple).

It really depends on what sort of look you're going for.