Cocos2d for IPhone Ramblings: Pref

I, for the most part, am not the type to write long drawn out blog entries about specific development technologies. That being said I am going to break character a bit and write a little about Cocos2d for IPhone. I have experimented with a few different game development APIs/Frameworks for the IPhone & IPod Touch and have come to the assertion that for me Cocos2d is the easiest and quickest way to get a nonstandard Touch application up and running.

BTW: I wont be giving any sort of C, Obj-C or XCode primer so before I start my second post on this thread go out and google up some Obj-C and XCode goodness. I will also not be going into introduction of OpenGL ES because there are volumes written on the subject. I like Jeff Lemarche's OpenGL ES from the ground up series. It is a great introduction to OpenGL ES written specifically for IPhone/IPod Touch by someone who writes books on the subject of IPhone development specifically.

Cocos2d for IPhone is an open source project under the GNU LGPL hosted on google code at cocos2d-iphone. It is a port of the Cocos2d Python framework re-implemented in the Objective-c programming language for use on the IPhone and IPod Touch by Ricardo Quesada and company. Go thank them and contribute, they deserve it.

Cocos2d sits on top of OpenGL ES abstracting away most of the more tedious time consuming aspects of OpenGl based 2d programming. Fact is you can use the framework without writing a lick of OpenGL rendering code. You can also dip down into the lower levels of the framework and change the underlaying OpenGL calls as all of the source code for the framework is at your disposal in the distribution.

My little ramblings about Cocos2d do not live in a vacuum. There are many other blog based Cocos2d programming tutorials covering basic usage, project creation and XCode integration, and even some fully implemented game source code to learn from. They are written by much more notable IPhone dev community members than I (The list of links above is not exhaustive). I will cover some of the same material but will be more concerned with looking at the architecture, object model and implementation details of the framework than creating an operational game. I will try to post at least once a week day job, side job and family permitting.

As you can probably see by this initial post I am a little hyperlink happy. I have a preference to linking directly to content specific to subject matter rather than paraphrase some other persons more thorough explanation. Please forgive this habit in advance.

Kenneth A. Barber

Flash as a mobile game platform

I have been reading a few articles and some blog post arguing the virtues of flash as a mobile game deve platform. I have my own reasons for being a little less than enthusiastic about a mobile flash player. The cost of the dev suite is rather high and the player in its current incarnation doesn't perform well on desktop computers let alone low memory mobile devices. Let me say that I love flash and have been a pretty loyal community member since the old future splash days. I am not hatin', I understand the comfort and control writing things in actionscript using the flash and flex IDEs can give. I just think that better performance can be squeezed out of compiled code.

Cocos2d Xcode template

So I have been experimenting with the Cocos2d iphone library. It removes some of the tedium of writing a games and non standard 2d applications for the IPhone. I decided I could make things even simpler by creating an xcode project template wrapping up the boilerplate Cocos2d stuff. I'm posting my cocos sandbox template here for others to use to base there experiments on if they please.

By and By

I have been knee deep in the IPhone SDK for the past couple of months so I haven't been posting like I anticipated I would be. As of late I have solidified on an app to write so I have been slowly transitioning from experimentation to actual application design and engineering. I am alternating between the design documentation and the boilerplate architectural stuff every couple of days pacing myself so I don't overload and get irritated. Its going well but it is taking all of my self control not to just start coding which has, in the past, killed home projects I have been working on.

I bought pixelmator

I purchased a copy of pixelmator over the weekend and I have to say I am quite happy with the functionality it offers for such a low price. I am well versed in Photoshop and likes but am trying to cut my cost down as I am now developing a commercial product on my own without any financial backing. This product is about 80 percent of the way to having all of the features I am used to having from other packages.

Bit 101 iPhone Dev Tutorials

There is a series of five related iPhone tutorials in the Bit-101 iPhone Blog section. These tuts are really easy to understand and will take you from nothing to functional timer based animation with touch and accelerometer support.

Shipley dead on!!

I just had a read of Will Shipley's "iPhone App Store: Let the market Decide" blog post and he is spot on in his assessment of the situation.  I would hate to see greed and ignorance ruin such a good SKU for third party developers.  Apple could easily take over the handheld gaming and productivity markets by doing the right things here.