[OzzyOsbourne]

Ray Wenderlich's website is a very valuable source of information for incipient iOS devs. A search:

http://www.google.co.za/search?sourceid=chrome&client=ub...

yields his website as the first few links.

Kudos to this guy for giving a head start to plenty of indie and starting game devs. I can attest to this as I used Cocos2D to produce my iOS game (since pulled because I have been too occupied this year to hack on iOS: last year of high school = major pressure to do well; very competitive environment). But this is beside the point: Wenderlich's tutorials are awesome, well-written and comprehensive. They won't get you production ready games in a flash, but they sure do help.

From an Indie point of view, iOS game development is considerably more accessible than Android game development by virtue of the following facts:

* Cocos2D is a robust, free and easy-to-use environment; a fully-functional, stable, Android analogue does not exist.

* iOS code is 99% universal (just works on all devices) whereas Android code really isn't. For instance: OpenGL sample code from the Android development guides (http://developer.android.com/training/graphics/opengl/index....) does not work on 2 of 4 android devices I've tried it on because it targets deprecated API's and methods which are unusable using the newest SDK versions (it was version 14 or 15 at the time; largely unimportant). Imagine how disheartening, demotivating and demoralising it is to see that "official Google endorsed code" just doesn't work.

* I have personally tried AndEngine and Cocos2D for Android. Neither is up to scratch with iOS Cocos2D.

tl;dr Ray Wenderlich is indirectly responsible for a ton of Indie games on the App Store, should be thanked, and no, an equal (easy-to-use portable, robust, _decent_ framework) doesn't exist for android (though there may be analogues).

edit: formatting

[Jare]

> Cocos2D is a robust, free and easy-to-use environment; a fully-functional, stable, Android analogue does not exist

Cocos2d-x is a very functional and robust C++ port / analogue of cocos2d, and it works on iOS, Android and Win32 (not sure about OSX and Linux?). Is that what you call "Cocos2D for Android"? What do you mean exactly by "up to scratch"? Android's fragmentation is a well known problem that can't be abstracted away, but that's no reason to underestimate the value of such frameworks (it sure is a reason to avoid developing for Android though). I for one love being able to develop abd debug in MSVC on Windows, and only touch Xcode / Eclipse for platform-specific stuff.

As an aside, the HTML5 version of Cocos2d-x is also functional but I can't vouch for its robustness

[vshade]

There is a Cocos2d for android, in java, that is not very good.

[scott_s]

Ray Wenderlich is indirectly responsible for a ton of Indie games on the App Store, should be thanked

I will do so the next time I see him.

[ojbyrne]

I took a course from him a couple of years ago and was very impressed. Hard working, smart guy.