iOS Making a pixel art game?

[ranguvar]

Hi,

I'm considering making a pixel art game for the iPhone. Since it's pixel art, the shapes and the perspective are going to be very simple (cabinet projection). Basically, I'll just have cubes.

Now, I'll also have to move the cubes around. So far, I could do everything with moving images. The problem is, the cubes will have to rotate as well. The rotation is simple: The cube always rotates up, down, left or right, and always by exactly 90°.

Now, I could maybe use hand-crafted images (maybe a .gif) to animate the rotation. It would probably not be too hard because I'd only have to do four separate images for the rotation in each direction.

Or, I could use OpenGL. I'd like to use OpenGL, but I fear I'd loose the ability to make the pixel art look great because you don't have pixel-by-pixel control over the display when using OpenGL. (btw, I'd love to be proven wrong here).

Which approach would you suggest?

 

[ulbador]

Are you actually trying to draw one pixel at a time? That seems horribly slow and inefficient.

With all the graphics libraries I've used, I've always written the pixels to a block of memory (like using an RGBA texture) and then you push the whole block of memory to the graphics system.

With the little bit of openGl I have done, I have always used something like a vertex array to do something like this. By adding more and more points to the array, you can gain finer and finer control over the individual pixels