Book Image

Cocos2d Cross-Platform Game Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Cocos2d Cross-Platform Game Development Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Cocos2d is the world’s leading game development framework for developing iOS games. With the introduction of Swift and Spritebuilder, it has become easier than ever to develop the games of your dreams without much effort. With Cocos2d, you can also deploy the game on Android, thereby maximizing profit and reducing development and porting costs. The book starts off with a detailed look at how to implement sprites and animations into your game to make it livelier. You will then learn to add scenes to the game such as the gameplay scene and options scene and create menus and buttons in these scenes, as well as creating transitions between them. From there on, you will get an understanding of how to program user interactions such as tapping, holding, and swiping. You’ll then add accelerometer inputs and physics to the scene, and make objects respond back to the inputs. A game is practically incomplete without audio being added, so this will be covered next. The next section will include ways to add Artificial Intelligence to enemies in the game, allowing them to patrol, chase, and shoot in a projectile manner. You will then learn to use NSUserDefault to save and load game progress, and create and access files using JSON, Plist, and XML files for custom storage and retrieval of data. Then you will learn to add dynamic lighting to your game and will use industry-wide tools such as Texture Packer, Glyph Designer, Physics Editor, Particle Designer, and Sprite Illuminator to create more visually appealing and performance-optimized games. Towards the end of the book, we dive into Apple’s latest programming language—Swift, highlighting the major differences between Objective C and Swift. The book culminates with taking your existing game developed for iOS and porting it to Android, showing you how to install the Android Xcode plugin as well.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Cocos2d Cross-Platform Game Development Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


There are a lot of games in the App Store that use physics, which has been made very popular by the famous game "Angry Birds". Physics engines add realism to the game and make it a lot more interesting. It also makes it a lot easier. All you have to do is provide the initial parameters, and the physics engine will simulate the output. Previously, you had to write your own physics code, which was tedious even if you got it right.

A lot of frameworks include a physics engine these days; Cocos2d includes a physics engine called Chipmunk. You might wonder, what a silly name for a physics engine! Despite its name, however, the physics engine is a lifesaver for us game developers.

Apart from Chipmunk, there is also Box2D, which is a more complex but also more sophisticated physics engine. Once you are familiar with Chipmunk, you will be able to hit the ground running with Box2D.