I've been thinking about starting to use Cocoa2d for some game creation, but was wondering if anyone here has any experience using it? I'm just starting to get comfortable with Objective C and don't want to introduce too much new stuff right now until I get a little more fluent, so I'm wondering how complicated Cocoa2d is to use, and if it might end up confusing me more than it would help me at this point, lol. Any thoughts? Is it fairly easy to use and integrate?

It's fun there are loads of tutorials raywenderlich.com has tonnes also people del kits you can skin with full tutorials step by step how to make. To be honest it will die out soon due to apple releasing spritekit that will getter better year in year out there are numerous tutorials on that too

Yeah, Ive been looking at those. I figure with my graphic design background, Spritekit and Cocoa2d would be a natural transition... just depends on the coding skill needed to implement them. I might have to download cocoa2d and play with it a little and see whats involved. Funny you mention ray wenderlich... i've seen a lot of his stuff, but I was skimming through one of his tutorials a few minutes ago which prompted me to post the question in the first place :)

It look s confusing games are more about maths skill to be honest , trigonometry, but there are a lot of helper code. I would suggest doing each of the small tutorials ninja throwing stars (appropriate) learn how it works collision detection, bounce gravity, there are tonnes. Avoid going straight for the finished source code if you want to learn properly follow each laborious step, don't go on until you understand what that line of code did. You can cut corners making menus and pass word screens and galleries. Games break when you cut corners lol

Lol, yep, exactly. I learned this when doing my Shark Attack game. Learned TONS about collision detection and gravity on the moving sprites on that one. I almost never go for the finished source code on a tutorial. I usually put in the 2 or 3 hours of going through each step. What's really frustrating is after 2 or 3 hours of following a tutorial, you get a sigbart error and can't find the cause... that happened when I first started making my slot machine plugin following a youtube 3 hour video tutorial. Very frustrating, lol. Still, that tutorial taught me enough to use the basic concepts to scratch the tutorial project and implement his teachings in a new project. I wouldn't have been able to do that if I went straight for the finished code (actually, I don't think he offered a finished code in that youtube tutorial... but still). It also didn't help that he spoke Korean and everything was subtitled poorly.

Thats half the fun, If you learn the 5 core concepts don't ask me what they are can't remember lol you can create any game. The idea is the hard part. With your graphic skills you could probably do well skinning and tweaking the kits Start launching angry ninjas in and angry birds style

I've been trying to find a good angry birds tutorial/example to skin and customize with certain features... can't find anything complete enough to do what I want with it yet for a base project to work from. I also have some pretty good plants versus zombie wave style game code... but some of the collision detection needs to be completed, and the parts that need to be completed are a bit over my head at the moment. I've even purchased the iOS Game Kit offered by AngryNinja.com (not to be confused with AngryNinjas.com, which is my site... they stole my name, lol, mine was out first... don't get me started, haha)... they offer a game kit that has a different wave style game and an angry birds clone... but their marketing is much better than their product. Their supplied code is unfinished, and their tutorials to finish it are not clear enough to follow very easily. The angry birds completion tutorial is 7 hours worth of video, and not easily followed by an objective C novice.

ha ha you won't believe this http://www.binpress.com/app/angry-ninjas-sling-shot-game-starter-kit-for-ios/780

bargain for 50 bun yaps though

Yep, they are the ones that stole my name a few years back. I've had the name since 2005. Thats what I get for registering the plural version of the domain instead of leaving the "s" off of it, lol. I notice they have no problem adding the "s" to their company name, marketing materials and logo though I bought their product last year. Very difficult code to follow.

really thats a shame I was going to buy it but then I thought I can't make images so pointless I do remember a couple, rays game packs look quite good if his other tutorials are anything to go by take it as a bonus as nobody buys an angry birds clone really do the, what would you add to make it unique other than graphics, but i'm useless with ideas. making your own game is the future

Yep, it's the unique platforms that make a game a hit... wave style (plants vs zombies), sling shot (angry birds), continuos development (farmville, hay day, clash of clans... made famous by the original sim city). It's more about creating a new genre than a game. For angry birds clone, I was going to load it up with leadeboards, achievements, social network sharing, and special powerups. All of the powerups would be based on whatever theme I created around it (not birds). I'd also have tournaments, which would integrate into the calendar and reminder systems of ios, where players could compete live... possibly even offer prizes if there was a paid entry system to pay for the prize. I have a few other ideas. I was thinking about incorporating the prize system into my slot machine app, where players can use in app purchase to buy coin packs, and then redeem their credits with the cashier to have real prizes mailed out to them. I thought this was against apples TOS, but MyVegas Slots gets away with it, offering vegas comps for redemption of points. If you ever need help with graphics work to do something like the slingshot kit, I'm willing to trade for coding work, haha. I have that plants vs zombies code that is just out of reach of my coding skills to finish up.

that would be good but I'd right some good secure code or the cydia generation could be claiming a lot of gifts lol

Yep, it would all have to have a validation system of some sort. Maybe an online logging system, which registers each winning spin for each player and calculates what is being claimed versus what balance the player "should" have

have fun with that lol

Yeah, it wouldn't be easy... just one of those features I'd like to implement at some point... not looking into it in the very near future... I have other easier things to implement into existing projects first.

The latest version of cocos (3.0) with the SpriteBuilder is pretty sweet. Disagree that its going to die out though. Simply because of 2dx, which is cross platform. If anything I think the cocos team will integrate some features of spritekit into the obj c version of cocos. The video here is worth watch. Dude builds a Angry Birds clone in about 5 minutes. http://www.spritebuilder.com/getting-started/

Sweet, definitely checking it out

Uber Cool. I hope Android plays out well too... I hope to play with all this stuff soon! Cheers! -- Smug