Currently, i'm 17 and in college working towards game design. Since I chose the wrong subjects for my 1st year, I want to know what sort of stuff I should learn (Basics of difference programming languages.etc) for developing simple 2d games on iOS. I already have some very basic knowlege of programming from the courses on codeacademy.com - I just want to know what sort of stuff I should end up researching to get into this career.
Well you will need to know the technologies used with iOS - that means Objective C, Cocoa, you will need to know how to use OS X, Xcode as iOS development is possible only with OS X.
^^ that To answer likely upcoming questions: 1) No, I don't think you can code for iOS in windows. 2) No, I don't think there's a free apple developers thingy... it costs money annually.
Sorta. AFAIK you can download iOS SDK for free, but you will have to get the $99/year developer subscription to be able to publish your apps.
Hmm. Screw that then, my teacher advised I look into it. What about development on windows, like flash games? What sort of knowledge would that need? Thanks for the responses anyway ^^
In case of mobile phone application development, your best bet is Android. SDK is free, you can publish apps as APK files for free, and in case of freeware applications you need only one time $25 free to be able to publish on Google Play Store (former Android Market). ADT (Eclipse plugins for Android development) are free as well, programming language for Android is pretty much Java + XML. In case of Flash, you need Adobe Flash Professional or other flash authoring tool : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Authoring_tools Never bothered with Flash, so i can't help you with this.
Students can also get 1 years free access to the Windows Phone App Hub, and through either your college or uni's MSDN or Dreamspark, you can get all the tools you need for that for free. Hope this helps!
If you can't get the necessary tools for free through your school or through DreamSpark you can always download the Visual Studio Express edition of your favourite flavour, C#, C++, VB et al. Or specifically for writing games there's XNA Game Studio. This one also lets you target Windows Phone 7.
You should also investigate cross platform tools such as phonegap. If this is going to be your career (or be linked to it) then you should learn as much you can about as much you can. Doesn't mean you need to learn C,C++,Ruby,Java etc etc but you should at least aim to learn the differences between the options and which uses which.
