Before diving deep into the fun world of game development, we will spend some time (but only a little) understanding what Cocos2D is, how it can help you develop games, and why you should use it.
In this chapter, we're going to review the following points:
What a game engine is and why you should use it
Why you should choose Cocos2D as a game engine
A list of games created with Cocos2D
Note
There are several versions of Cocos2D. The original Cocos2D is written in Python and was first released in 2008. There is also a C++ version called cocos2d-x, HTML5 version called cocos2d-HTML5, and several other versions.
In this book, we're going to review the currently most popular version of Cocos2D, that is, Cocos2D Swift (previously named Cocos2D-iPhone). However, for brevity, I will just call it Cocos2D.
If in future you will want to learn some other version, it will be quite easy, because all versions share the same architecture, main concepts, and a majority of functions.