Today’s link is about the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern and how to implement it in Cocos2D. Bartek Wilczyński from Poland has written a two-part tutorial about how to implement this design pattern, and explains why this is a good design choice:

How to implement MVC pattern in Cocos2D game - Part 1
How to implement MVC pattern in Cocos2D game - Part 2

While I was reading that, I remembered that Jeremy Flores had created a github repository with his implementation of a MVC pattern in Cocos2D. He dubbed his project Cocos2D-MNC, as in Model-Node-Controller. The code is published under the MIT license.

The MVC pattern is somewhat similar to a game object component system that I described here. For both systems, the general idea is not to subclass CCSprite and put your game logic in there. CCSprite already is a complete visual representation class for your player, enemy, and what not. But in some cases, you need more than one sprite, or a combination of a sprite and particle effects. Once you get there, it’s much better to have a CCNode containing (aggregating) all the visual elements of your game object, while handling all the game logic of that object and updating the visual elements. The CCNode becomes the controller, controlling the views. As the views (sprites, effects, GL drawings, etc.) move on screen, the controller node polls the visual nodes for state information and runs the game logic code, which in turn may update the views.

In very simple terms, this is my pragmatic approach of the MVC pattern that also works quite well. It’s definitely already a big leap forward compared to extensively subclassing the CCSprite class. If you notice that you’re doing that a lot, you should do yourself a favor and read up on the MVC design pattern.

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