Chapter 7. Animations and Particle Systems

We have already seen several ways to animate our game objects. We have moved the bird from one side of the screen to another, we've animated the birds' wings, and finally we've animated the hunter reloading the arrow and the arrow flying after it was shot.

These are all examples of animations. In fact, there are many ways you can animate your object and you don't always need multiple images to animate it. As an alternative, you can just change its position, scale, rotation, or other properties over time to bring the static image to life. By the way, this is exactly how animation is translated from Latin—the act of bringing to life. Your goal as a game developer is to make the player believe that the object is alive, irrespective of how you achieve this.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Frame-based animation
• Animating objects by changing their properties over time, using Cocos2D actions
• Reviewing...