Beginner path to Game Development for OS X and iPhone

Question

Another question. I have been researching everything this wonderful community has offered me in terms of my journey to pursue game development.

I have come to the conclusion that I would prefer to develop on my native machine, OS X - eventually leading to the iPhone.

I already own both Big Nerd Ranch guide's, Iphone Programming - the Big Nerd Ranch Guide and Learn to Program on Mac OS X - the big Nerd Ranch Guide.

My goal that I am trying to shoot for is a game similar to Blizzard's Diablo II.

When going through these books, everything seemed a bit over my head due to lack of Objective-C experience (so I suspect).

What it the best beginner friendly way for me to reach my goals? I have been looking at Objective-C books for beginners from Apress and the like, or straight C books.

How would experienced developers such as yourself guide a newbie through this path?

Regards

• edit -

To answer why I have picked the apple route, it just looks to be the most comfortable (environment is native to the machine). I may be very wrong though. I was looking at Unity, it supports C#, JavaScript and Boo. Others like Panda3D use Python. I am just not sure, it seems like the decision process has become rather challenging.

Answer 1

It depends on the kind of game you're making - but many of the top games on iPhone were created with an open-source framework called cocos2d. It is fabulous, simplifies everything, has great tutorials and is available specifically for the iPhone.

Check it out at:

http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/

Answer 2

I would recommend you

a) learn the basics of C (especially memory management)

b) learn the basics of Objective-C

c) learn the iPhone SDK from a book (I liked "Beginning iPhone Development" and its 2nd volume)

d) pick any project you find interesting and that is not too challenging and just code. You will find that by the time you are done, you probably think the things you did first are horrible, but you will learn a lot in the process

e) visit Stackoverflow.com as often at possible, it has most of the answers to the questions you will have :)