Quartz 2D vs OpenGL ES Learning Curve

Question

I have been developing iPhone Applications for a couple of months. I would like to know your views about the Quartz vs OpenGL ES 1.x or 2.0 learning curve. You can tell your perspective. My Questions are

*I am a wannabe game developer, So is it a good idea to first develop in quartz , then move
on to OpenGL ES or does it not make an difference *Can you please tell your experiences when you were having the similar question

Thanks :)

Answer 1

Quartz 2D is not applicable for game development IMHO. It is a software rendering API. It won't give you realtime rendering speed. It's good for drawing charts or vector text with shadows, or for blending several images together. Just not for games. Unless you want to make a game where few images are moving against a monochrome background and even in that case I doubt it will be really smooth on older devices. I've seen some games obviously coded with Quartz. A pitiful sight.

Sooner or later you'll end up using Open GL ES or a game framework build on top of it. I recommend you to check cocos2D, SIO2 engine, or examples from SDK. With careful programming it is possible to make an Open GL ES game with parallax scrolling and relatively small amount of objects work at 60 FPS even on 2nd gen devices. Tiny Wings is an example of such game. And maintaining stable 30 FPS is not a problem at all.

Answer 2

I skipped Quartz and went right to OpenGL ES. I started with a 2D sprite based game. Thought it was pretty easy.

The key is having a good example to look at. I used the Lunar Lander clone (Crash Lander), but I don't think that's easy to find anymore. Maybe someone who has done it recently knows of a better, newer example that uses current best practices.