Introduction - Learn SpriteBuilder for iOS Game Development - page 8

So, in summary, you could say that learning SpriteBuilder is a worthy endeavor not only
because it can significantly reduce development time, but also because it's fun to play
with and experiment with. At the end of the day, you don't just get results faster, you also
get better results. What's more, you can still write code for whatever you feel would still
be faster to code rather than design visually. Once a node designed in SpriteBuilder has
been loaded, you are free to write code that modifies, replaces, or discards the node as you
see fit.
About Cocos2D
Cocos2D in this topic refers specifically to Cocos2d-Swift. It's actually just Cocos2d-
iPhone rebranded under the Cocos2d-Swift name because it now officially supports mak-
ing games using Apple's Swift programming language.
Of course, you can still use Cocos2d-Swift to write apps with 100% Objective-C code,
and the engine behind Cocos2d-Swift is still essentially Cocos2d-iPhone, written entirely
in Objective-C and plain C. But now you can also write your program code in Swift,
either by optionally adding Swift code mixed with Objective-C or by creating apps en-
tirely with Swift code.
Note This topic will make no use and little mention of Swift. As I started writ-
ing this topic, Swift wasn't even available to developers.
Cocos2d-Swift is a popular, free, and open-source 2D rendering engine with a physics
framework. It was originally created as Cocos2d-iPhone by Ricardo Quesada in 2008 and
became probably the most popular 2D game engine for iOS. It was so popular that by
2013 Apple released its own 2D rendering framework with iOS 7, named Sprite Kit .
Much of Sprite Kit's design and terminology is borrowed from Cocos2d-iPhone at that
time.
Sprite Kit's release was an unexpected and long overdue catalyst for creating the third ma-
jor iteration of the Cocos2d-iPhone engine, which also got a new name along the way:
Cocos2d-Swift. Now an entire team of developers have essentially touched and improved
every aspect of the engine to make it better than Sprite Kit in every aspect.
Cocos2D includes the tightly integrated Chipmunk(2D) physics engine and plenty of cool
new features to boot. For example, the renderer is now equal to, if not faster than, Sprite
Kit's and optionally uses Apple's new Metal rendering framework. There is a CCEf-