Cocos 2D and Me

The Cocos2d for iPhone Xcode project comes with a number of demos, which are useful both for seeing visually what the engine is capable of, and for digging into the code to see how things are done.

To start, download the latest version from the official Cocos2d for iPhone website. There are a few options for which package to download, but I recommend you get the latest Unstable Version. As Cocos2d is still in pre-release the API is in somewhat of a state of flux, and it often changes some between versions. In my experience the unstable versions have actually been perfectly stable, and have the benefit of including all the latest API changes, meaning you won’t need to mess around making changes to your code later on.

If you open up the downloaded archive, you’ll see an Xcode project inside:

As you can see, I’m currently running Cocos2d v0.99.0-rc – in other words the release candidate for v1.0. Open up the Xcode project and do a Build as a sanity check to make sure everything is ok. You might get some Warnings, but these can be safely ignored.

To run the demos, you’ll probably need to make a small change to your Xcode settings. Go to the View menu, and choose Customize Toolbar. From here, you want to drag both the Active Target and the Active Executable drop downs on to your toolbar, like so:

You’ll then need to select the same thing for both the Active Target and the Active Executable, as in the image above. You might also need to change the Overview drop down so that the code runs on a version of the Simulator (or your Device, if you prefer).

At the moment there are about 40 demos you can run, so work your way through them to get a feel for the library.