Raydelto Hernandez, the author of Building Android Games with Cocos2d-x, talks about the Cocos2d-x game engine, which is widely used to create Android games. The launch of Apple's App Store in 2008 leveraged the reach capacity of indie game developers who were thence able to reach millions of users and compete with large companies. This led the trend of creating reusable game engines, such as Cocos2d-iPhone.
Picking an existing game engine is a smart choice for indies and large companies. It allows them to focus on the game logic rather than rewriting core features repeatedly. Among the most popular engines for mobile systems, Cocos2d-x is the only one you can use for free.
Other frameworks also allow some free usage, but you must pay for the usage license at some point. To understand why Cocos2d-x is free and open source, let's see how it was born. Ricardo Quesada, a Python programmer, often participated in game creation challenges. His team would rewrite the core engine for each game, until they came up with the idea of creating a framework to cover core game capabilities. These capabilities could be used for any 2D game.
With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Ricardo led the development of the port of the Cocos2d Python framework for iPhones. Cocos2d-iPhone quickly became popular among indie game developers; some of them became millionaires. This made game development companies look at Cocos2d seriously. Zynga adopted it to deliver their famous game Farmville on iPhone in 2009.
In 2010, a C++ port of Cocos2d iPhone, called Cocos2d-x, was written in China for use on other platforms, such as Android. Today, Cocos2d-x-based games dominate the top charts of Google Play and the App Store, especially in Asia. Recognized companies such as Konami, Zynga, Bandai Namco, Wooga, Disney Mobile, and Square Enix are using Cocos2d-x. Currently, there are 400,000 developers working on improving this framework. These include engineers from Google, ARM, Intel, BlackBerry, and Microsoft.
Cocos2d-x is very straightforward and requires little learning to grasp. It provides all the components that are required for a game: physics, audio, collision detection, animation, data storage, 3D rendering, and more! For all of this, you can try out Building Android games with Cocos2d-x today.
If you want to learn game development for mobiles, Cocos2d-x is strongly recommended because it is easy to use, totally free, and open source. You can modify it if needed, and you will never have to pay a fee.
