Learn & Master Cocos2D Game Development

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Today marks a new beginning: SpriteBuilder v1.0 is now available on the Mac App Store for free and it goes together with the release of cocos2d-iphone v3.0.

SpriteBuilder is the successor of the design tool formerly known as CocosBuilder. It is specifically designed to work with cocos2d-iphone v3. SpriteBuilder now has its own website with a dedicated SpriteBuilder forum that you should use for any questions about and suggestions for SpriteBuilder.

SpriteBuilder has already been used successfully to create games like Campus Life (Pocket Gems), Jelly Splash (Wooga) and The Meego (A Thinking Ape). See more on the games list.

SpriteBuilder comes bundled with cocos2d-iphone v3, it even creates a new cocos2d Xcode project when you publish your scenes. Everything is set up and ready to go, you can start writing custom custom code with no extra steps.

Cocos2d v3 in turn comes integrated with Chipmunk2D physics and a host of changes and improvements. It’s the largest, most complete overhaul and re-imagining of the engine since its inception, and there’s more features to come such as an overhauled renderer and better asset handling.

What is Apportable?

Cocos2d-iphone, Chipmunk2D and SpriteBuilder are developed with commercial support from Apportable bringing the leading tools and their developers together to create a free, open source Objective-C cross-platform development environment. Cross-platform mainly being the ability to port your Objective-C games to Android, but of course Mac OS X is also a fully supported platform.

In case you don’t know: Apportable is a tool that directly compiles Objective-C code to Android. It is specifically engineered to provide great performance for games on Android. There is no emulation layer or Java bridge sitting between your game and the Android CPU. The Objective-C code is compiled directly to ARM machine code.

Win-Win

I too was hired as a part-time, off-site consultant and developer by Apportable to work with the SpriteBuilder team. I’ll share what exactly I’m working on when the time comes.

Me and my colleague felt we needed to build or adapt a game design tool with OpenGW integrated, to compose entities and allow editing game logic from within a visual editor. SpriteBuilder is a perfect match for this endeavour so it made a whole lot of sense to join up with Apportable to support its development.

When I’m not working on SpriteBuilder and as soon as we’ve moved into our new office, I promise we’ll be wrapping up the Super Stick Spy platformer game kit and release it together with OpenGW. You can already access a preview version of OpenGW & Super Stick Spy by signing up to KoboldTouch.

In the meantime enjoy SpriteBuilder!