Chapter 1, Installing Cocos2d-x, guides you through the download and installation of the Cocos2d-x framework. It also examines the ins and outs of a basic Cocos2d-x application and deployment to both iOS and Android devices.

Chapter 2, You Plus C++ Plus Cocos2d-x, explains the main elements in the framework. It also covers the differences in syntax when developing in C++, and the differences in memory management when developing with Cocos2d-x.

Chapter 3, Your First Game – Air Hockey, kick-starts our game development tutorials by using Cocos2d-x to build an air hockey game. You will learn how to load the images for your sprites, display text, manage touches, and add sounds to your game.

Chapter 4, Fun with Sprites – Sky Defense, demonstrates the power of actions in Cocos2d-x, and shows how an entire game could be built with them. It also introduces the concept of sprite sheets and the steps to build a universal application targeting different screen resolutions.

Chapter 5, On the Line – Rocket Through, adds two new elements to our game development toolbox: how to draw primitives, such as lines, curves, and circles, and how to use particle systems to improve the look of our game with special effects.

Chapter 6, Quick and Easy Sprite – Victorian Rush Hour, shows how you can use Cocos2d-x to quickly implement game ideas for further testing and development by rapidly building game prototypes with placeholder sprites. In the game example used for this chapter, you'll also learn how to build a side-scrolling platform game.

Chapter 7, Adding the Looks – Victorian Rush Hour, continues with the project from the previous chapter adding the final touches to the game including a menu and a playable tutorial.

Chapter 8, Getting Physical – Box2D, introduces the popular Box2D API for a physics simulation, guiding you through the process of using Box2D in the development of a pool game. You learn how to create bodies and manage the way they interact with each other.

Chapter 9, On the Level – Eskimo, teaches you how to load external data for game levels, how to store game-related data locally as well as structure your games with multiple scenes. We use a second Box2D game to illustrate these topics, plus a couple of new concepts, such as using the event dispatcher to structure your games better.

Chapter 10, Introducing Lua!, will guide you in the development of a multiplatform match-three game using Lua and the new Cocos Code IDE. You will see how similar the calls are between the C++ version and its Lua bindings and how easy it is to develop a game in Lua.

Appendix A, Vector Calculations with Cocos2d-x, covers some of the math concepts used in Chapter 5, On the Line – Rocket Through, in a little more detail.

Appendix B, Pop Quiz Answers, provides answers to the pop quiz available in some chapters.

In order to run the games developed in this book, you will need Xcode for iOS devices, and Eclipse for Android, as well as the Cocos Code IDE for the Lua game. Although the tutorials describe the development process using Xcode in each chapter of the book, you will see how to import the code in Eclipse and develop and deploy from there.

You have a passion for games. You may have used Cocos2d already (the Objective-C version of the framework) and are eager to learn its C++ port. Or, you know a little bit of some other C-based language, such as Java, PHP, or Objective-C and you want to learn how to develop 2D games in C++. You may also be a C++ developer already and want to know what all the hoopla about Cocos2d-x is. If you fit any of these scenarios, welcome aboard!

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Time for action, What just happened?, Pop quiz, and Have a go hero).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a procedure or task, we use these sections as follows:

Instructions often need some extra explanation to ensure they make sense, so they are followed with these sections:

You will also find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "For background music volume, you must use setBackgroundMusicVolume."

A block of code is set as follows:

CCScene* GameLayer::scene()
{
   // 'scene' is an autorelease object
   CCScene *scene = CCScene::create();
    
   GameLayer *layer = GameLayer::create();

   scene->addChild(layer);

   return scene;
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

//add score display
_player1ScoreLabel = CCLabelTTF::create("0", "Arial", 60);
_player1ScoreLabel->setRotation(90);
this->addChild(_player1ScoreLabel);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sudo ./install-templates-xcode.sh -u

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In the dialog box select cocos2d-x under the iOS menu and choose the cocos2dx template."

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