Learn iPhone and iPad cocos2d Game Development [Paperback]

Steffen Itterheim (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2010

Learn iPhone and iPad cocos2D Game Development provides a rock-solid introduction to the cocos2d iPhone game engine and related tools. It focuses on the process of creating several games made entirely with cocos2d and little-to-no iPhone SDK and OpenGL code. By creating 2-3 sample games over the course of the book, you'll learn key concepts of the cocos2d game engine and relevant tools like Zwoptex (TextureAtlas), ParticleDesigner (Particle Effects), and others.

The example games are modeled after popular App Store games so that they are relevant, recognizable, and immediately fun and inspiring. The games increase in complexity and highlight common recurring cocos2d beginner questions. As you move along, you'll learn about possible stumbling blocks and how to navigate them successfully. As you move from beginning to advanced, you'll encounter general game programming wisdom, tips for performance improvement, as well as pointers to alternative implementations and further reading.

It is assumed that the reader has previous programming knowledge but not necessarily with Objective-C. Related topics such as Xcode, Objective-C, the iPhone SDK, and OpenGL are only discussed where absolutely necessary.

What you’ll learn

• Familiarity with the core cocos2d game engine API and the Box2d physics engine
• Understanding of the process and best practices of game development, in the context of cocos2d and its related tools
• Enthusiasm and excitement to create your own games paired with a realization that you are able to create games which can compete on the App Store
• Where to go from here: further information and alternative implementations

Who this book is for

The book is aimed at beginning game developers looking for an easier and even more powerful way to create compelling 2D graphics using OpenGL and Objective-C. It is assumed that the reader will have some knowledge of object-oriented programming and the Apple and iPhone/iPad developer environment.

Check out the forum for Learn iPhone and iPad cocos2D Game Development: http://cocos2d-central.com

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Getting Started
3. Essentials
4. Your First Game
5. Game Building Blocks
6. Sprites In-Depth
7. Scrolling with Joy
8. Shoot ’em Up
9. Particle Effects
10. Working with Tilemaps
11. Isometric Tilemaps
12. Physics Engines
13. Pinball Game
14. Game Center
15. Out of the Ordinary

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Steffen Itterheim is a professional games and tools developer. He has worked for Electronic Arts Phenomic for the past seven years. Be it scripting, programming, or foreign languages, he's done it all. He has extensive experience with game localization including non-western languages and locales, and he also knows the Lua scripting language inside and out. He learned English by watching too much American television. Steffen currently lives in Ingelheim, Germany.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (December 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430233036
• ISBN-13: 978-1430233039
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #720,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 46 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent introduction and more for cocos2d November 27, 2010

By Arjun Roychowdhury

Format:Paperback

A disclaimer: I am not a game programmer. But I am a techhie, who usually picks up on new things very quickly. My interest in iphone game programming began a few months ago. My first game was using just the UIKit but then I discovered cocos2d and saw how simple it makes things. You will find a zillion (literally) tutorials on the web on cocos2d (one big reason being its so simple to use). The author of this book mentions some of them in his credits page. But there is a problem with the web tutorials: While they are great to start you off, they don't get into much details on advanced things like memory optimization, etc.

Now onto this book: I've been tracking both this book, and another one (which is about to be released) and I bought the e-book version on day one of its release. The credentials of Steffen are just right (EA games). When I first started reading the book (first few chapters), I thought he was over simplifying stuff too much - for example, encouraging us to ignore apple's memory management guidelines, sticking to cocos2d autorelease mechanisms, and also using "tags" to find sprites instead of maintaining a pointer to them. This is what the cocos2d tutorials on the web say, and that is what he says too. So I thought he hasn't spent much time trying to analyze better mechanisms.

But then, as I read ahead, Steffen starts getting into details on how to pack memory, increase performance with various tips etc. that certainly went beyond what you can infer from reading web tutorials. It became obvious, once I was beyond the first 60-70 pages that he knows what he is talking about.

Here are the pros of the book:
a) It's really the first good book on cocos2D that you can buy. You theoretically could just read the many web tutorials, but some of them give you incorrect information (for example, using NSTimer directly with cocos2d - which will mess up CCDirector's pause/stop, for example). Steffen's book is thorough and well thought out and caveats are outlined in each chapter based on his experience

b) The book covers the particle system well enough. I am glad he spent time on it.

c) On Parallax scrolling, he also covers infinite parallax scrolling, which I think any game programmer doing parallax will eventually want

d) While this may be obvious to game programmers, I never knew about the coolness of SneakyInput - a 3rd party library that already implements console controls for the iOS. Steffen covers this well

e) While there are many tutorials on tilemaps (it took me 30 minutes to learn how to use tilemaps from a tutorial by SDKTutor on youtube), Steffen goes one step ahead and dedicates a full chapter on isometric tilemaps (3D effect in 2D space). That is wonderful

f) Steffen dedicates a full chapter on Box2D (and a bit of chipmunk) and the nice thing is he takes it to another chapter where he shows how to build a pinball game that integrates Box2D with cocos2D in a working game. This is great on two counts: 1) Box2D has many tutorials, but most of them stick to a bouncing ball. They don't spend too much time showing more details on how to integrate it with a CCSprite (besides that common loop code) and merge it well into a more complex cocos2d game. In Steffen's game, he takes it several notches ahead. Box2D or chipmunk play an important role in how to make a game look real by physics (think angry birds and the cool tower toppling calcuations) 2) He explains Box2D well to a point not to get into the math but enough to know how to use it

g) He covers GameCenter as well - though I have not yet read that chapter

Now the con:

a) There are several typos. I find this odd because his is not the only book. I found typos in many other apress books. This being a programming book, typos mean the code won't compile. Thats almost unpardonable. I wonder why apress isn't more diligent about this

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Do Not Order The eBook February 19, 2011

By W. Hartman

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The content of this book is pretty good. There are a lot of good sources of picking Cocos2D on the net, but it's always nice to have a good resource from which to learn a new framework. The code examples are *mostly* complete, but I noticed in a few areas that the author didn't include some crucial code that forced me to go dig into the accompanying source code to figure out what was missing. Minor annoyance, for sure, but it'd be nice to not have to leave the book and start doing diffs to figure out what was missing.

My biggest complaints really center around the eBook edition of this publication: The author and publisher have recognized a series of poor-quality images that somehow managed to creep into the final edit of the eBook version, but have done nothing to rectify the situation. It has been three months of vain promises that it would be fixed, without any real action that would indicate follow through. For an industry that is experiencing turbulent times in a digital age, this is more evidence that people can find better service from alternative sources, than the legitimate ones. While I realize that the author is not responsible for this kerfuffle, I cannot recommend buying this book, if for no other reason than the publisher is not responsive to fixing an issue that they clearly should own.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Badly needed book for cocos2d December 6, 2010

By Naveed Ahmad

Format:Paperback

I was looking for documentation. This is the very first book on cocos2d and was badly needed. I have gone through many of the short tutorials on the web and was able to make prototypes from it. After reading half of this book i realized there were still many things not in the web sites. After reading the first 8 chapters a programmer should be able to develop a working game. It has lots of useful tips, programming good practices in it. I will definitely recommend to any iPhone game developer.