As I started working on my space shooter game, I needed to decide on how to go about starting to program the game. I explored a little bit of what frameworks and libraries were available, and what I chose is cocos2d. It’s an open source framework for building 2d games on iOS devices. It makes developing 2d games super-simple, providing classes to encapsulate sprites, objects on the screen, menus, actions (movement, rotation, fading, etc.), and basically almost everything you may need to make a really nice-looking 2d game.
I was thinking that I might make a tutorial on how to use Cocos2d, but the documentation at the site is really good, and I’m not sure I could do any better without significant effort. I recommend starting with the basic concepts page, and then following the examples in the programming guide. So this post really isn’t anything other than a tip to check it out.
But, because the code is really easy to incorporate into a project and it seems to work really well, I do want to suggest that anyone looking to work on a 2d iOS game should look into cocos2d.