Cocos2d

Cocos2d is a family of open-source frameworks for building 2D games and other graphical applications. It was originally developed for iOS to provide a high-level API for sprite-based games and has since expanded to multiple languages and platforms.

Initially released as Cocos2d for iPhone by Ricardo Quesada and colleagues around 2008, the project spawned several forks and variants. The principal branches include cocos2d-objc for iOS/macOS (Objective-C), cocos2d-x, a cross-platform C++ port, and cocos2d-js, which targets JavaScript. A broader ecosystem later incorporated Cocos Creator, an integrated editor and runtime built on top of the engine to support component-based development and rapid iteration.

Core features include a scene graph of nodes, sprite rendering, animation through actions and sequences, tile maps, particle systems, and audio support. The frameworks provide scheduling, resource management, and input handling, along with optional physics integrations with Box2D or Chipmunk for physics-based gameplay. Rendering is optimized for 2D with hardware acceleration and support for texture atlases and sprite sheets to improve performance.

Cross-platform support is a hallmark: cocos2d-x targets iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux; across variants there are ports to HTML5 and other runtimes. The engines are released under permissive open-source licenses, with contributions from a wide community of developers.

Cocos2d-based projects have been widely used in mobile and desktop games and educational applications. Over time, the ecosystem has diversified, with ongoing maintenance of cocos2d-x and the development of Cocos Creator as a modern development workflow on top of the core engine.