Cocos2d Cross-Platform Game Development Cookbook - Second Edition

Develop games for iOS and Android using Cocos2d with the aid of over 70 step-by-step recipes

About This Book

• Learn to efficiently use Cocos2d to develop cross-platform games, and have them work on iOS as well as Android
• Get acquainted with industry-wide professional tools such as Glyph Designer, Texture Packer, and Physics Editor, as well as using the Swift/ Sprite builder implementation of Cocos2d
• Use the easy-to-follow recipes to develop as well as deploy games to the Playstore and the App Store

Who This Book Is For

This book is for intermediate game developers and especially the ones who are generally curious to find out what's new in Cocos2d v 3.3.

What You Will Learn

• Build custom sprites with custom animations for the game
• Build interactivity into your game by adding gestures and touch interactions
• Understand AI enemy programming and path finding to make games more exciting
• Add physics to your game to make it more lively and interactive
• Get familiar with the Swift and Sprite builder implementations along with Objective-C programming
• Perform hassle-free deployment of games built in iOS onto Android
• Add effects and particle systems to make the game more colorful

In Detail

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.

Style and approach

The book is written in an extremely lucid and step-by-step manner; it can be understood easily by anyone. The topics included are broken down into individual chapters so you can refer to the specific chapter to get answers on the subject you are interested in.