Revisiting Coco2dx

January 23, 2015

It’s been almost a year since I really seriously worked on cocos2dx. Cocos2d was perhaps the first real game framework I worked with. Going through the process of setting up the work enviroment and actually making games taught me a heck of a lot about software development. After dappling with other engines like Unity and Unreal, I decided to take a look again at the old framework I started out with.

How It Was Two Years Ago

It seemed like such a hassle back then to set up the basic ennvironment. I remember I never really got the Android component of cocos to work 100%. I kept having these issues I put off. For the most part, what I had was good enough for what I was doing. I pretty much just wanted to make as many games as I could at that point, so having something that worked most of the time was fine at the time. This intial struggle I had could also be attributed to my lack of experience. It was, afterall, my first time diving into any real project. Once I got rolling with making stuff, the issues I put off became more noticeable. That original plan I had didn’t exactly scale well as every project then-after had the same issues from them beginning. All in all though, I was able to make a large amount of games in a relatively short amount of time.

How It Is Now

I installed the most recent version of cocos2dx a few days ago, and I gotta say; they either made the process more streamlined, or I’ve gotten way better at setting things up. In about 10 minutes, I already had a project up to play around with. I read the official guide to refresh on the core concepts of the framework. After that I was able to create a basic template so i wouldn’t need to start completely from scratch everytime start a new project. The new changes they made since I started were very noticeable. The added C++11 features really made code look a lot cleaner. I was able to get a lot done in a really short amount of time.

Final Thoughts

Cocos2dx will always hold a special place in my heart. It allowed me to create my first games and I’ve learned a lot of invaluable lessons by going through the process. For a beginning gamedev, I think it may be easier to start with a game engine like Unity, but if you’re more inclined to do everything programmically, then choose cocos2dx all the way!