Chapter 1, Graphics, covers a wide array of topics. It starts by taking a look at the basic uses of sprites. From there it provides examples for 2D and 3D primitive drawing, video playing, particle effects, ease actions, texture filled polygons, palette swapping, lighting, parallaxing, and more.

Chapter 2, User Input, provides examples of different styles of input typically used in iOS game development. This includes tapping, holding, dragging, buttons, directional pad, analog stick, accelerometer, pinch zooming, and gestures.

Chapter 3, Files and Data, discusses techniques for persisting data. These include PLIST files, JSON files, XML files, NSUserDefaults, archive objects, SQLite, and Core Data.

Chapter 4, Physics, covers a large number of uses of the Box2D physics engine. Examples include debug drawing, collision response, different shapes, dragging, physical properties, impulses, forces, asynchronous body destruction, joints, vehicles, character movement, bullets, ropes, and finally creating a top-down isometric game engine.

Chapter 5, Scenes and Menus, provides examples of user interface implementations. It starts with examples involving scene management then moves to typical UI elements like labels, menus, alert dialogs, and UIKit wrapping. From there it moves into more advanced techniques like draggable menu windows, scrolling menus, sliding menus, loading screens, and a minimap.

Chapter 6, Audio, covers a wide range of audio topics which vary in difficulty. These include sounds, music, audio properties, fading audio, in-game examples, positional audio, metering music and dialogue, recording, streaming, playing iPod music, creating a MIDI synthesizer, speech recognition, and text to speech.

Chapter 7, AI and Logic, discusses techniques for adding intelligent AI actors into your games. These include processing waypoints, firing projectiles at moving targets, line of sight, and flocking behavior using Boids. The pathfinding problem is tackled in four separate recipes: A* pathfinding in a grid, a Box2D world, a TMX tilemap, and a side-scroller. Finally, the chapter discusses adding Lua scripting support, dynamically loading scripts, and using Lua for dialogue trees.

Chapter 8, Tips, Tools, and Ports, provides example uses of commonly-used tools including the Cocos2d-iPhone testbed, Zwoptex, Tiled, JSONWorldBuilder, and CocosBuilder. It also discusses porting a Cocos2d project to C++ using Cocos2d-X and using Cocos3d to develop a 3D iOS game. Finally, it discusses the process of releasing your app on the Apple App Store.

This book includes projects that contain fully functioning example code. You'll need the following to run the example code:

If you want to elevate your basic Cocos2d project to the next level, then this is the book for you. Some understanding of Objective-C and Cocos2d is recommended. People with some programming experience may also find this book useful.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "In this recipe we will cover drawing sprites using CCSprite, spritesheets, CCSpriteFrameCache, and CCSpriteBatchNode."

A block of code is set as follows:

@implementation Ch1_DrawingSprites
-(CCLayer*) runRecipe {
/*** Draw a sprite using CCSprite ***/
CCSprite *tree1 = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"tree.png"];

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

afconvert -f caff -d ima4 mysound.wav

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: "Right-click your project under Groups & Files."

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