What is Kobold2D?

It’s the Ultimate Cocos2D Project, of course. Or more precisely, the official name for it. Right now, the website www.kobold2.com is only a “coming soon” page while development is under way.

What’s in a name?

Calling it “The Ultimate Cocos2D Project” all the time would have become tedious rather quickly. I wanted a name that is reminiscent of Cocos2D yet completely different. As luck would have it, I’ve recently watched a lot of Battlestar Galactica episodes. You might remember that in this show humanity’s home planet is called Kobol. I couldn’t help but think of COBOL all the time. 😉

From there it was a small step to Kobold, which in germany is widely associated with a famous cartoon Kobold called Pumuckl. As a kid, I was a big fan of Pumuckl, so picking Kobold2D as the name was a no brainer. Even more so since it has the same ring to it than Cocos2D.

Why create a new brand name?

For one, giving the project a name of its own clearly makes it more attractive. It expresses a certain dedication to the project. It should also signal that it’s no longer just about Cocos2D. With all those extra libraries and additional glue code, plus an experimental project I’m working on, I’m tempted to call it a Game Development Kit (GDK). That’s the long term vision for Kobold2D: more power, easier - for everyone!

Speaking of long term, that’s another reason to give it its own brand name. The visionary thought being that ultimately, something like Kobold2D could be implemented for other game engines as well, with the same core values: give the developers more power, greater flexibility but at the same time make it easier for them to get started.

The Kobold Team

I’m not the only developer who is aching for a more professional work environment. Kobold2D is a joint-venture with another senior software developer and a couple helping hands who help out wherever and whenever they can. We agreed to share the development burden on a voluntary basis. We all have different stakes and interests in the development of Kobold2D.

For me personally the most important aspect is my ambition to develop a project for its users, both professional and casual. I know I can build professional systems that are easy to use, well documented and thus get the job done painlessly. This basically sums up what I’ve been doing for the past 10 years.

What we’re not doing …

There’s one issue I think i going to come up, which might confuse some people, so I want to be clear about this: we are not creating a branch of Cocos2D. We have no intention to do so. We use the library as is, and we stick to the stable builds. The same goes for all other libraries of course.

At the same time, we don’t push each and every line of our additional code back or even contribute to the development of the libraries in Kobold2D. That’s not what we set out to do, and we simply don’t want to spend too much time consulting with and compromising on changes with others when our code is already there and working for us. Our code uses the MIT License, so it’s there for the taking.

In very few cases we can’t get around to modify library code. We only do this where necessary, for example if it breaks our build and the fix is rather simple. Other than that, if a library doesn’t work to our satisfaction, we try to add our fixes and improvements on top, either by subclassing or by making use of Objective-C categories. So far this has been working very well and allows us to keep updating the underlying libraries with far fewer hassles.

Next steps

One big task that I set myself out to complete before continuing with Kobold2D is figuring out the Xcode 4 template format for File Templates and Project Templates. I almost have everything together after spending practically the whole week on it. I’m also documenting all my findings and I’m going to publish the Xcode 4 Template Tutorial / Reference / Documentation / Manual (not sure about the name yet) by the end of the month.

The goal for Kobold2D is to have various project templates, which is why I’m doing extensive research on the new Xcode 4 template format. Unfortunately at the moment it seems that it will not work satisfactory with cross-referenced Xcode projects, but I remain positive that I can find a solution.

Kobold2D private beta!

There will also be a private beta test for Kobold2D starting in a couple weeks (couple == definitely more than 2 weeks). Reply to the private beta sign-up thread if you want a chance to be picked for the private beta test.