Emanuele Feronato

Talking about iOS.

Today is the day, from now on I will be blogging about Xcode development using the popular cocos2d for iPhone framework.

In this first step I’ll only show you only to install Xcode and cocos2d and have the default Hello World project running, but since I want to port some Box2D games I made to iPhone, you will see a lot of cocos2d tutorials in the near future.

Since most tutorials online assume you are already familiar with Xcode and its language, I’ll start from the bare bones, as if you just bought a Mac and want to create an iPhone game. Every future tutorial will be explained showing similarities between AS3 and objective C.

The scope of the whole thing is: if you made it with AS3, you can do it with cocos2d.

Here we go with the installation of Xcode: get it from the Mac App Store or directly from iOS Dev Center. Sooner or later you will need to apply iOS developer program, so if you didn’t already, I suggest you to read the post creation of an iPhone App with Flash and without a Mac (for all Windows lovers) which guides you through the application to Apple iOS developer program.

At the end of Xcode installation, you will see something like this:

Don’t start Xcode at this time, but download cocos2d for iPhone and start a Terminal session to install cocos2d templates into Xcode. If you never used Terminal, you can find it here:

Don’t type anything in the Terminal window, just drag and drop in it the install-templates.sh file you can find in your cocos2d folder and press return.

Now, all cocos2d templates will be installed in the proper folders:

So you are ready to start Xcode and create a new Xcode project:

Choose the cocos2d iOS template you installed from the Terminal session

Give your first project a name and enter you company indentifier, which is conventionally your company domain from right to left.

Choose a folder where to save the project and you are ready to go:

Congratulations: this is what you should see right now, and if you are about to quit everything because of too much information displayed, take a deep breath, it will be easier than what you think.

This is where this tutorial ends, just press the Run button in the top left of the toolbar, and you will see your template project run in the simulator:

Next time, your first cocos2d game. Really. I will show you how to make a game in one single lesson. Are you happy to start seeing something with cocos2d?