Question

I would like to make an iOS game whose features are comparable to that of a simple Tic Tac Toe game. I was wondering that which environment will suit best for my needs.

1. using UI Cocoa components.
2. using Cocos2d.
3. Using OpenGL.

I want an easy-to-handle environment.

Answer 1

The key point is:

As I’m new to iOS and OpenGL, and game is not that complicated. I want a easy to handle environment.

so I would suggest going for Core Animation. In Core Animation, you could use CALayer to represent tic-tac-toe cells; layout them appropriately; and change they graphical status with an animation. Pretty straightforward.

Cocos2D would also do, since it is a plain 2D game engine, but it is more complex to learn since it will also address requirements for more complex games (hence, it offers a number of abstractions: sprites/nodes/layers/scenes/animations/spritesheets…).

OpenGL would be overkill, but it could be a good choice to learn it.

Also, have a look at this: iOS Development Course Fall 2010 Lecture 14 – Tic-Tac-Toe with Inheritance

From What Is Core Animation?:

Core Animation is a collection of Objective-C classes for graphics rendering, projection, and animation. It provides fluid animations using advanced compositing effects while retaining a hierarchical layer abstraction that is familiar to developers using the Application Kit and Cocoa Touch view architectures.

Dynamic, animated user interfaces are hard to create, but Core Animation makes creating these interfaces easier by providing:

1. High performance compositing with a simple approachable programming model.

2. A familiar view-like abstraction that allows you to create complex user interfaces using a hierarchy of layer objects.

   1. A lightweight data structure. You can display and animate hundreds of layers simultaneously.

3. An abstract animation interface that allows animations to run on a separate thread, independent of your application’s run loop. Once an animation is configured and starts, Core Animation assumes full responsibility for running it at frame rate.

4. Improved application performance. Applications need only redraw content when it changes. Minimal application interaction is required for resizing and providing layout services layers. Core Animation also eliminates application code that runs at the animation frame-rate.

5. A flexible layout manager model, including a manager that allows the position and size of a layer to be set relative to attributes of sibling layers.

Using Core Animation, developers can create dynamic user interfaces for their applications without having to use low-level graphics APIs such as OpenGL to get respectable animation performance.