I've just gotten basic UIKit down. I've made several personal apps and such, but now I'm ready to move on to a game with some other developers. Both of these frameworks look powerful and have tons of bells and whistles.
Does anyone have a preference? Are there pros and cons when compared to each other? They both seem to have similar syntax and performance.
while working as a game developer specifically for ios, cocos2d is best suitable.Some of the reason are as:
1.Open source and objective-c language
2.free of cost
3.you learn a lot means u have to compromise with development time.
4.it supports PVRTC texture which reduce memory usage. PVRTC is an image format. When it is loaded into RAM, it consumes less memory at the expense of image quality. PVRTC is not yet supported in the current version of Sparrow.
for sparrow: it's still inits development phase It is highly similar to the framework in Flash/Flex. If you are a Actionscript 3 developer, you will be highly familiar with Sparrow. no support for PVRTC, No integrated Physics engine and particle system.
below is the list of resources which i found as a beginner for development. You can jump to some of the links http://www.raywenderlich.com/352/how-to-make-a-simple-iphone-game-with-cocos2d-tutorial
https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-iphone
http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-game-development/42419-how-integrate-cocos2d-doxygen-xcode.html
what is chipmunk/physics engine http://www.alexandre-gomes.com/articles/chipmunk/
list of all frameworks http://www.tonylea.com/2011/best-iphone-game-frameworks/ http://talkbinary.com/iphone-development/9-game-engines-for-iphone-development/
hope it help u!!
I find the Sparrow Framework API to be much cleaner and more consistent than Cocos2D's. You'll also get much better official documentation to get started with Sparrow development, and the developer is very responsive on the forum. Cocos2D's Wiki is quite incomplete and partially out of date, and the forum is so crowded and chatty that it's hard to find the buried gems.
However, Cocos2D is extremely popular and there are way more tutorials available online (check out http://www.raywenderlich.com) and books (like mine: http://www.learn-cocos2d.com/store/book-learn-cocos2d/). You'll also find more developers to ask for help.
Then there's Kobold2D which (but I'm biased) is an exciting alternative to Cocos2D with 15+ example projects, important source code integrated (cocos3d, cocos2d extensions, Lua), the entire API references available online, offline and as Xcode Help, and better cross-platform (iOS & Mac OS) support.
The definite answer is cocos2d since it is easy to learn, have a strong community and well documented and more rich in feature comparing to Sparrow. I haven't used Sparrow but i heard it is also easy , but it lacks of active developer and forum. And Cocos2d is achieving more and more attention to developer for 2d game development in iOS. So it's better to use cocos2d.
