iPhone:Learning Cocos2D project

Question

I want to develop a game in a month by using the Cocos2D Open Source game engine. Learning Cocos2D is a bit hard and I don't know how to create my initial project by using the files provided by Cocos2D base project. I doubt whether it is possible?

Can I learn by using Cocos2D base project directly and modify it for my game application? Does the license allow me to use like that? ( Because I can't learn all OpenGL programming concepts and develop an application in a month, which is very hard. )

Appreciate your thoughts and advice.

Thank you.

Answer 1

, I have been programming games for iPhone for more than a year now! I started doing most of the things in Objective-C but then I learned that for most graphically ( or computation ) intensive games, Objective-C is not really the best option. There are a lot of paths like Pure Objective-C for logic, and inline C functions for the more "intensive" parts of your game, Obj-C does also let you use C++ files ( for the model classes for example ) with Obj-C++ (which is basically a .m Obj-c source code file but renamed to .mm for Obj-c++ ).

Having said that, Cocos-2D is in my opinion a wonderful library, it's mostly written in Obj-C but has pure C parts for the most CPU intensive stuff (physics it's chipmunk physics and Box2D, they also have a hash table library written in pure C to avoid calling NSDictionary a lot). Cocos2D is not hard to use, and you can get a nice game working quite fast!

You can embed the whole Cocos-2D to a project of yours, or just embed some useful parts of it (like Cocos-Live for On-Line scores, the Texture loaders, etc). You could also start working directly from the Cocos-2D Xcode project and remove what you don't need (like examples etc).

For a simple explanation of the Cocos-2D license , read Here !

About OpenGL, with Cocos you won't need to learn it deeply, unless you start getting into very custom stuff.

Having said all that, here are my recommendations :

1) GUI takes time, GUI can take a lot (even more than 50%) of your source code actually... so take that into consideration if you are going to have game menus, etc.. and adjust your time schedules to make the GUI coding fit!

2) When you have learned Cocos a bit, start playing with OpenGL, it's a wonderful ride, and it's really great to know a bit about the "Engine" of your "Car" so if your "Car" (Cocos2D) break's or doesn't do exactly what you want, you can always tweak here and there to make it work.

Answer 2

For what it's worth, I tried to pick up Objective C a few times over the last year but gave up pretty quickly each time (though I used to do C a lot in the early 90s). Just over a week ago, though, I watched some screencasts and eventually decided to start making my own game. I then discovered and gravitated toward using Cocos2D.

Now, 9 days later, I have a prototype of a game done (it's a kinda clone of Robotron 2084). It's been great fun doing it so far and while this is not the most up to date version (this was at the 1 week mark), this video will give you an idea of what I've achieved: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzD6va1GiTI

I started by using the default Cocos2D project and just figuring it out and adding stuff as I went. I did a TON of Googling and often ended up here on Stack Overflow and on the Cocos2D iPhone forums (which are VERY useful). I've scratched my head a lot but it's been a fun experience (except for tracking down memory leaks ;-)).

Cocos2D is, I believe, LGPL licensed but has some extra clauses tagged on to make it even more free so you can use it in your iPhone game projects commercially or not without any problems.

I've found you don't need to learn much about OpenGL. I've copied and pasted some free snippets from here and there but they've been simple to figure out. Things like drawing lines and boxes, etc. I haven't learnt any "hard" OpenGL stuff. I've just stumbled and got a pretty long way, IMHO. I now feel pretty confident and am still finishing off this game to get it on the App Store and want to develop more!

Make sure to start with the latest Cocos2D 0.99-rc because they changed a lot of names and it'll annoy you if you have to upgrade in future. It's very stable and works fine. Go to http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/download and download it, unpack, then run the template installer. Then create a project using the Cocos2D template in XCode and Build & Run it on the iPhone Simulator. You'll get a basic example that you can then dig around in. Read the Cocos2D iPhone "Programming Guide" on their site too and gradually figure out how to change the scene to do something you want it to do. Small steps, etc :-)