iPhone Game Blueprints: If you're looking for inspiration for your first or next iPhone game, look no further. This brilliant hands-on guide contains 7 practical projects that cover everything from animation to augmented reality. Game on!

Despite of the book title this is a book to everyone that is interested in the game's creative process and not only on the iPhone game development. This book has not programming code instead it has a lot of information about the creative process and the information could be employed to every game development framework.This book takes you on the path of the inner creative steps that every professional game must take before start programming. So, it is very helpful to everyone that wants to develop a game but cannot figure out how to start it.As a special mention I would like to remark that the ergonomic chapter contains an accessible games section that for me is one of the best sections of this book because it covers a lot of features that a game designer must consider to make their game accessible for people with disabilities, for example people with color blindness, photosensitive epilepsy, handedness, cognitive and communication dysfunctions among others. This is one of the reasons for me to get this book because it takes very seriously this aspect that other specialized books do not consider.According to each chapter:The book begins with a sound introduction to the initial concepts as the fact that a game is a manner of telling a story and requires defining characters, personalities, world features and levels. Then it introduces some technical creative features as the game naming, the manner of work with the game graphics and character animation. It explains how a game must define their own personality using their own icons, images and characters as a trademark. Also it makes evident the different features that a game must have to be attractive for example the use of trophies, a good marketing using well designed banners, screenshots and game play videos.The ergonomics chapter explains how to adapt the games to the player comfort. It makes evident the basic rules, how to consider the number of clicks required to achieve a task, where and how to put the pause, continue and control buttons, when and how to perform the auto saving tasks, how to correctly manage the health regeneration of the character's player, how to display the different levels landscapes and how to manage the level difficulty, finally how to manage correctly the sound and music. This chapter also explains how to deal with the different screen sizes, where to place the buttons considering the comfort of the user fingers and the best practices to place the UI elements.The gesture games chapter, this book introduces you to the basics of this kind of addictive games, how to elaborate the concept, how to adapt a game idea to this kind of games. It explains how to manage the gestures features, the intuition and light responses. Finally it creates a game example following the common steps and explaining it step by step.The Card and Board Games chapter explains the human games fundaments, how they were conceived and which features make them an attractive and addictive game. It depicts how this kind of games has evolved along the history, and how the elements and actors can be modified in order to achieve a different game outcome. This chapter finalizes explaining the step by step creative process of a card game.The Puzzles chapter depicts the nature of this kind of games. This chapter explains the connection nature of this game and how to create them using different ideas and types of features as the words, mathematics, tile-matching, match-tree, etc. It also introduces a lot of design suggestion considering puzzle type mixtures for example a tile shooter among other options.This is done in order to create original puzzle games. It also covers graphic and playability aspects. It ends with a step-by-step creation process of a puzzle game.The platformer chapter covers a domain of avatar-like dynamic games because the user-game character interaction that enable the user to employ their game character as a game avatar. Therefore this chapter explains how this kind of game are produced considering the game idea, the plot, how to set the game controls, design the screen layout, how to create a character according to the human natural perception, the character and environment animation, how to make the character walk, jump, shoot, etc and how to make the environment and enemies react with the interaction considering physics. The final part of the chapter explains how to create a plat former game.The adventure chapter introduces the concept of an adventure game, in other words, a selectable-path history that enables you to have different ways to perform the adventure. It explains the different kinds of adventure games. Also explains how to build an adventure game using different approaches as the conversation trees, phrases and dialogs. It finalizes creating an adventure game example through a step by step process.The action games chapter starts introducing the shooting game types and then explains the creative process to build a similar game. It details the features that an action game requires. It also considers the graphic problems and the mobile devices low processing power.The games with reality chapter covers the augmented reality games it makes a state of the art of such a kind of games. Therefore it shows several examples of existing games and the open possibilities for this still unexplored games domain.In conclusion this book focalizes mostly on the creative step by step process than in technical or programming features. It presents several game creation process examples along the book that enable the reader to clearly understand how to do it before start programming.

This book should have been called something like, "Loads of great game art examples, how to design a mobile game of almost any type, animation, game design, human interaction and perception and a bit of iPhone stuff as well"Chapter 6 alone was worth the price of the book. With a detailed break down on how to design game characters. How do you make them cute, scary, etc. And more interestingly, why do our brains perceive them as such? If you are serious about design or you just want to constantly improve your apps, on any platform then this book and its sources will help you build an enormous todo list.If you want to make games, need ideas, want to improve your artwork then get this.

Ok, first off. I love this book. It is impossible to read this book and not be inspired to make games.But there is one huge problem with this book. And it is a big issue. Especially since this is a book. You know, full of sentences. In English.The author clearly is not a native English speaker. The book is so badly written that half of the sentences make no sense and need to be deciphered to get any meaning out of them what so ever.How a publisher can send a book like this to market is beyond me. Where was the editor? Asleep? Fired? Dead? I don't know, but I do know he didn't read this book. Actually i find it a scandal on the part of the Publisher Packt!When that is said and done, Igor obviosly knows his stuff, and if you are willing to accept English grammar that is...well really bad, go buy this book.Bad grammar and sentence construction apart, this is a great book.