Question

I see that certain texts always seem to subclass CCSprite. I read somewhere that it is not good to do that and that it is better to start with something basic. I wanted to find out what the pro game developers do in terms of game structure. That is subclass CCSprite or add CCSprite in a NSObject class ETC.

I hope my question makes sense.

Answer 1

Your question definitely makes sense.

It’s fundamentaly an architecture question. If your game is mainly based on “animation”, I’d go for subclassing CCSprite. If your game is mainly based on some logic, maybe a RPG or whatever else, then the screen representation is in fact just one of the possible views of the game state. Therefore, it should be, in my opinion, part of an object in the tree of objects that represents your game state.

In other words: if your game state is essentially a scene, then subclass CCSprite, because Cocos2D is probably way better than you at managing scenes. If your game state is “something else”, you probably should consider building your own representation of that state, and make your sprite part of your game object. This will also allow you to “switch” graphics engines if you decide to change rendering. For example, you might be doing a RPG with a 2D representation in Cocos2D. After a while, you show your demo to Ubisoft and they fall in love with it and give you 20 million dollars to finish it, but they request a 3D rendering. If you went for subclassing CCSprite, you have to redo all the game. If you went for integrating the CCSprite/CCNode in a NSObject-derived class, you’re good to go.

Of course, that example is slightly exaggerated for the purpose of … example 😀