Cocos2d – A Native GameDev Framework for iPhoneOS

URL: http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/

Code Quality: Production-ready (still under active development, but very stable)

Description:

Cocos2d is a 2D game/graphic app development framework inspired by the Cocos2d Python framework of the same name, but re-implememented inObjective-C and targets at the iPhoneOS platform.

Among the Cocos2d features are: (feature list excepted from the cocos-2d site)

• Scene management (workflow)
• Support for 2 different physics engines, Chipmunk5.0 and Box2D
• Transitions between scenes
• Sprites and Sprite Sheets
• Effects: Lens, Ripple, Waves, Liquid, Twirl, etc.
• Actions (behaviors):
• Trasformation Actions: Move, Rotate, Scale, Jump, etc.
• Composable actions: Sequence, Spawn, Repeat, Reverse
• Ease Actions: Exp, Sin, Cubic, etc.
• Misc actions: CallFunc, OrbitCamera
• Basic menus and buttons
• Integrated physics engine (both Box2d and Chipmunk)
• Particle system
• Text rendering support (variable and fixed width fonts)
• Texture Atlas support
• Tile Map support (TMX maps):
• Orthogonal maps
• Isometric maps
• Hexagonal maps
• Parallax scrolling support
• Sound support
• Streak Motion support
• High Score server (Cocos Live)
• Touch/Accelerometer support
• Portrait and Landscape mode
• Integrated Pause/Resume
• Fast Textures:Supports PVRTC textures, 16-bit textures and 32-bit textures
• OpenGL ES 1.1 based

Unlike the very high-end commercial gamedev systems for the iPhone, like Unity or Torque, Cocos2d is not a script based game development system; what this means that you are programming with Objective-C and manipulating objects directly rather than through a highly abstracted scripting language such as Lua which then gets compiled down to lower-level objects/code. The gives the programmer a lot more control, but of course demands that you know more about basic programming, including  memory management, understanding how use the physics engines that are part of Cocos2d, etc.

Given the focus of Cocos2d is on the guts of the programming, there are other features it lacks including integrated level editing, and the other graphics/scene or audio tools, that can be found in sysems like Unity3D, but  there are  lots of  open source tools (including Blender and The Map Editor (for creating tile-based game maps)  that can be used to generate assets for your Cocos2d projects so this doesn’t seem to be a huge deficit.

The framework itself is also under very active development with bug fixes and new features being added on a regular basis.  The principal author/maintainer of cocos2d, Ricardo Quesada, is very responsive to questions and has several commercial side projects including a fully-featured example game called Sapus Tongue and a SVG-based level editor which can be purchased and used to help aid/guide your own development.  There is also a very active community of Cocos2d developers who participate in the Cocos2D forums; a number of well known developers aslo blog about their experiences and offer a lot of great examples, tip and tricks to using the framework.

As of this writing there are dozens of games on the AppStore that were developed using Cocos2d, including some well known top sellers: StickWars, Quantum Collapse, AirHockey and Occurro!

See also:

Cocos2d framework example/demo movies and the Cocos2d games page