Question

I am interested in developing IPhone game and am confused whether to choose HTML5 way to do it using Phonegap or using OpenGL ES.

I have developed HTML5 based games but I have never used OpenGL. This is very basic games and requires some great lighting. It’s rocket flare game where rocket comes down to earth flaring.

Answer 1

If you have already programmed a game in HTML5, you should know whether this approach is ok for you or have some limitations. Big benefit is you don’t have to develop the game for each platform, and this is a big plus.

On the other hand, using OpenGL ES will give you access to all the potentiality of hardware acceleration has they are available on iOS and possibly improve your frame rate. But you have a steeper learning curve and this is not exactly a multi-platform approach.

In any case, if you are interested in giving a try to OpenGL, I would suggest looking into one of the frameworks that are available out there to make you life easier, both as far as ease of use (programming) in concerned and portability.

One great framework is cocos2d, including one of the two major physics libraries it supports, chipmunk and Box2d.

Another framework you could look into is Cinder, and a third one is openFrameworks, depending on your game overall feature set.

I have worked mostly with cocos2d, and IMO this is the best option if you want to build a game; the other two frameworks, that I have only investigated about, offer a better integration of different technologies, like audio, video, besides OpenGL. As far as I know, none offers an IDE allowing you to define your scene or sprites. Anyway, for cocos2d there are several tools that make easier to manage texture atlas, tilemaps, or define the shapes of your sprites (e.g., for collision detection).

The only framework I know of that also sports an IDE is Unity3d, but this has a cost.