Chapter 3

Essentials

This chapter will introduce you to the essential building blocks of the cocos2d game engine. You’ll be using most of these classes in every game you create, so understanding what’s available and how these classes work together will help you write better games. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll find it a lot easier to start working with cocos2d.

Accompanying this chapter is an Xcode project named Essentials that includes everything I discuss here plus additional examples. The source code is full of comments, so you can read it as if it were an appendix to the book.

We’ll start with a high-level overview of the cocos2d game engine architecture. Every game engine is different in the way game objects are managed and presented on the screen. It’s best to begin with an understanding of what the individual elements are and how they fit together.