Preface

Cocos2D Swift is a popular and robust framework used to develop 2D games and applications. It is fast, easy to use, open source, and has a big and friendly community. It is free, and you can use it for commercial purposes with no restrictions.

Cocos2D can be used to create games and applications for iOS, OS X, and even Android (via Apportable). There are thousands of games in the AppStore created with this Cocos2D framework, including many bestsellers.

Cocos2D Swift is written in Objective-C and was previously named Cocos2D for iPhone. Renaming the project simply shows that Cocos2D developers are looking into the future and will continue improving the project to support all the latest Apple's innovations.

At the time of writing this book, you can only use Objective-C to create games using Cocos2D Swift, but in future, both languages will be supported. This book covers the Cocos2D API and Cocos2D concepts that will remain unchanged, independent of the language you use to write your code.

There are several ways to learn a new topic, but I think the best way to learn game development is by actually making games. In this book, we're going to take a practical approach and complete many common tasks that arise when creating games. We will work on rendering and animating sprites and text, handling user input and controlling the game, implementing game logic, adding sound effects and music, building user interface, using physics, and so on.

At the end of this book, you will know all the basics and will have some practical experience to start creating games.