Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank my mom, Shanti Shekar, and dad, R. Shekar, for their continuing unconditional love and support and love (this is not a typo). Thanks to my uncle, Krishna Kumar, for teaching me how to type commands in order to change drives so that I could play Pong and Space Invaders from the floppy drive on his PC.

I am also thankful to the team at Cocos2d-x for creating this amazing framework. Thanks to Jing Chen, Jianhua Chen, Xiaoming Zhang, and Mai Dung for all their help. A big thanks to the ever-expanding and helpful Cocos2d-x community for answering all the questions on the forum.

Also, I can't thank enough Andreas from CodeAndWeb, Tom from 71Squared Ltd., and Nate from Esoteric Software for their awesome tools; I would have otherwise spent most of my time developing the tools instead of creating games.

Thanks to Ujjwal Kumar from Microsoft for providing test devices and valuable technical information, thereby making the writing of the book and the game development process a lot simpler.

Special thanks to Packt Publishing for putting this book together. I would like to thank Richard Brookes-Bland and Anila Vincent for helping and guiding me at every step of the book writing process. Thanks to the technical reviewers, Sergio Martínez-Losa del Rincón, Alejandro Duarte, and Germán González Rodríguez for the technical feedback and tips; I have really learned a lot of new things in this process.

Finally, I would like to thank all my friends for tolerating me all these years, especially my high school friend N. Venkat for being such a good friend, and my college friend Kartik Ayyar for introducing me to the world of computer graphics, animation, and gaming.

This book is dedicated to all those who just want to have fun while making awesome games.