CHAPTER 1: Introduction
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with a lot of comments, which should help you navigate and understand all the nooks
and crannies of the code.
Learning from someone else’s source code with a guide to help focus on what’s
important is what works best for me whenever I’m learning something new—and I like to
think it will work great for you too. And since you can base your own games on the
book’s source code, I’m looking forward to playing your games in the near future! Don’t
forget to let me know about them! You can share your projects and ask questions on
Cocos2D Central (www.cocos2d-central.com), and you can reach me at steffen@learn-
cocos2d.com. You might also want to visit my web site dedicated to learning cocos2d at
www.learn-cocos2d.com and you should check out how I’m improving cocos2d with
Kobold2D by visiting www.kobold2d.com.
What’s New in the Second Edition?
First, I’m proud to have had Andreas Löw as the coauthor for the second edition.
Andreas is the developer of the TexturePacker and PhysicsEditor tools, and in particular
he went out of his way to update the projects for several chapters with new code and
better graphics.
Most importantly, the goal of the second edition was to bring the book up to date with
recent developments, one being the final 1.0.1 version of cocos2d as well as
compatibility with Xcode 4 and iOS 5. The text, the code, and the figures have all been
updated to reflect the new versions of cocos2d, Xcode and the iOS SDK.
Many more changes were made based on reader feedback. Chapter 3 has been
overhauled to improve and extend the descriptions of essential cocos2d features. It has
also become more visual, with a lot more figures illustrating key concepts and classes.
The number of figures in the book has increased throughout.
Over the course of a year, new tools for cocos2d game development have emerged. To
reflect the changing tool landscape, the book now refers to TexturePacker in favor of
Zwoptex as the leading texture atlas creation tool. Since Löw works full-time on his
tools, his customers benefit by receiving frequent updates, new features, and great
support. Similarly, PhysicsEditor is used in the second edition in place of VertexHelper
since it offers a far better workflow and powerful convenience features. Finally, the
second edition introduces you to Glyph Designer, which is essentially the Hiero Bitmap
Font tool but with a native Mac OS X user interface and with none of the bugs that
plagued Hiero.
The shoot ’em up project first introduced in Chapter 6 and used throughout Chapters 7
to 9 has seen a graphic overhaul. Let’s just say it looks a lot better than the
programmer’s art it used before, courtesy of myself. Likewise, Chapter 13, the pinball
physics game, has been improved with new code and improved graphics. Accordingly,
the aforementioned chapters have seen some of the more substantial changes.
Last but certainly not least, the second edition adds two entirely new chapters.
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