Cocos 2D and Me

Now that we’ve decided upon Cocos2D for our game engine, let’s take a look into what the engine offers. Before we get too much further in though, I’d like to recommend that if you are brand new to the iPhone platform and/or Xcode, I would highly advise that you do a little catch up reading. One of the best ways to do this is to read Beginning iPhone Development. This really is one of the best books around on how to get started developing on the iPhone, and gives a good coverage of what you can do with the platform.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can a look at what Cocos2D has to offer. If you take a look at the official Cocos2D for iPhone website, there is a quick summary in the About section of the main engine features. Let’s go over a few of them:

• Scene management – just about all games have different screens apart from the main game. These might be high scores, settings, different levels, and so on. Cocos2D lets you set these up easily, and transition between them with a number of (sometimes cheesy) effects.
• Sprites – a sprite is pretty much the technical name for a graphic or image. If your game includes any sort of graphics, generally they will be handled by the Sprite class in Cocos2D in a memory efficient manner.
• Actions – Cocos2D allows you to run all sorts of actions on your sprites, such as movement, rotation and scaling.
• Physics engine – Cocos2D integrates with two well established physics engines, Box2D and Chipmunk. Both engines allow you to easily implement complex physics interactions between objects and the game environment.
• Menus – setting up your menus and controlling the flow between the different parts of your game couldn’t be much easier.

Naturally, Cocos2D offers many other things, but the points above are probably the main features you’ll be using, at least while we get started. While you’re looking at the About page on the official site, you might as well check out the videos as well. These show off some of the different effects that the engine is capable of.