If we've learned anything from the "Flappy Bird" incident, it is that it is still possible for a free game, from an independent developer to make money, a lot of money. Video games are extremely popular on smart phones and tablets. While the odds are against your game becoming a smash hit, is still possible to make a fun game which generates a bit of money via direct sales or in-game advertising. In this three part session we will explore using Cocos2d-x, an open source game engine, to build games for all three major smart phone platforms - Android, Apple, and Microsoft. Unlike other game engines, Cocos2d-x is not only free, it runs on multiple platforms giving you the ability to port your game not only to the most popular phone platforms but to desktop platforms like Windows and Mac OS X.

In the second session, we will put together a simple but playable game. We will write our code in C++ and port to all of the platforms. I will show how to animate characters and create levels in CocoStudio then use in our game. Plus I will delve into the crucial but rarely included technique of debugging your code.