The building blocks, nodes

In Cocos2d, everything you see on screen is a subclass of the CCNode class. Even the scenes your game has are subclasses of the CCNode class.

There are some important subclasses that will be used in almost every game. Therefore, it is important to know them. These are as follows:

• CCSprite: This represents an image that can be animated
• CCNodeColor: This is a plain colored node
• CCLabelTTF: This is a node that renders text in any TrueType font
• CCButton: This is an interactive node that can have an action attached
• CCLayoutBox: This is a node that lays out other nodes in a vertical or horizontal layout

Tip

The CCLayoutBox node replaces the CCMenu class, which was in the previous versions of Cocos2d.

The reason every class inherits from the CCNode class is that there are some important properties that all visible elements on-screen need. These are as follows:

• contentSize: This is the size of the element in the unit that is specified in the contentSizeType property
• position: This...