Short answer: no Long answer: Maybe, if you had some sort of virtual environment set up. I tried that route, and it was terribly slow on my machine (running virtualized OS X). Someone who knows what they're doing might have more luck. You may also check out the Unity engine. It allows porting games to iPhone, as well as a standalone browser plugin. I believe the IDE works for Windows and Mac. You MIGHT be able to write the game and test it on Windows, but AFAIK the only way to actually transfer to your iPhone or upload to the App Store is with a Mac. I was in a similar position and I spent $550 on a Mac Mini for iPhone dev -- haven't regretted it.
You could make a Flash game in Windows... I dunno what you'd need to port it over though, and let's face it... it's probably just not as good.
To entirely develop iPhone games on Windows is not realistic, you need a Mac in the chain at some point. You can however do a significant amount of development on the Windows platform. From what I've read, Minigore is developed mainly on windows, the gameplay videos are captured on windows and they use an XBox 360 joypad to control the game. The new book iPhone Game Projects, edited by Dave Mark, has a chapter on developing cross platform games. It might be worth taking a look at it.
Flickitty is mostly developed on Windows. It is 99% C/C++ and only uses Objective C to bind the necessary things to OSX. We use equivalents to OSX that are used in Windows. However, a Mac is still required.
we use a cross platform development environment - pretty much like flickitty mentioned; we developed a lot of our games on linux and windows.. we also have builds for mac osx (native) but the end result needs to be compiled using xcode; you need their signing tools built into xcode for releasing on the app store.
Same here, 95% of Besiegement was developed on Windows using Visual Studio for the superior (imho) environment and debugging tools. But the last 5% still has to be done on a Mac. I couldn't stand xcode... even after remapping most of the keys. The home key should take you to the beginning of text on the line, not column 1. grrrr
Very curious -- are you using C++ instead of Obj-C to write the game? Or how is that you're able to use Visual Studio? I absolutely HATE XCode, and would be much happier in Visual Studio or Eclipse.
Try a hackintosh. Google it to find out more. It's a mac u Can install on a PC. Also it's free with full features of a mac
If you want to prototype in Windows, you can use Torque2D. But you'll need a mac to build the actual iPhone app.
Well I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but it's not illegal or any more unreliable than a regular mac, if you set it up right. It is unsupported, but heh, so is any other form of iPhone dev on Windows.
C++. Obj-C and Obj-C++ can be freely mixed with C and C++. Just rename the files to have a .mm extension to compile using C++. Then you can mix in standard .cpp files. I built two shells, one in OSX and one in Windows, that create the window/view, setup OpenGL and translate touches/mouse movements. The core portion of the game (95%) is shared with an occasional #ifdef to do OS specific things. I can then use Visual Studio to code and debug the vast majority of the game. I also set up a Synergy environment to control my Mac and Windows box using the same keyboard and mouse. So when it comes to the Mac work and final builds/debugging, I can flip between the two machines seamlessly.
I don't think you need to rename the files to compile the C++. You can use Get Info in xCode to override the file type settings. That is what I do. We do most everything on the PC and only do final builds and device specific debugging on the Mac/device.
Eclipse??? pls tell me ur joking.. Xcode is like a billion times better than the bug-fest, crash-ridden piece of shit called Eclipse. I used Eclipse at work and its ****ing horrible. Dont get me wrong, Xcode is not great, but at least its stable. WHile Eclipse just drive you fuking mad.[/rant]
Um... I don't know what version of Eclipse you're running, but I've been using Eclipse(Flex Builder) for 3 years in my day job and I absolutely love it. I wish Xcode could do half of the things that Eclipse can do(ie. moving lines up and down with keyboard shortcuts). If yours is "****ing horrible" you must just have it set up wrong. Seriously. Anyway, the tip above about using Synergy is also very good. Synergy is an amazing piece of software. I do all of my graphics work on a beastly quad-core Windows PC and all of my coding on my macbook, but with synergy + svn, it feels like one computer. It's a sweeeeeet setup!
