How to start developing 2d games for iOS on cocos2d?

Question

iOS

I want to write a game for the iPad and I have a few questions about this case:
1. Where can I get the theory of creating games. That is, how the game is organized, what rules are there in the formation of the game space, genres, types of gameplay, etc.?
2. How to make levels in the game in the Xcode environment using cocod2d?
3. What is the best and how to make character animations?
I do not ask for complete answers, you can even indicate the direction, in the form of literature or sites.
PS The answers are not questions:
1. no, I don't want to make the second angry birds
2. yes, I have programming experience for ios

Answer 1

I can hardly recommend literature, but I can share my experience. The process of creating a game is as follows:
first, a document is created with a general description of the game, then, in the process of heated discussion, the document is overgrown with details, details, features, and so on. The resulting document is called GDD (Game Design Document). It should describe in detail all game modes, Windows, features, transitions, states. To create a window in a graphic editor that is convenient for you, a fake is created (just a picture with the desired result), then the artist disassembles the feck into details, finalizes them and passes them to the game designer, game design creates GUIs in the existing tool (if necessary) and gives everything to the programmer, who adds resources to the game, prescribes in the code the loading of the necessary projects, callbacks on buttons, and the like.
I'm currently building a coco game myself, only I'm using cocos2dx (a cross-platform C++ variant).
About gui, levelam and animations. There are tools for coconut, for example, I use CocoStudio. It has modules for creating GUIs, skeletal animations and scenes. At the same time, the tool exports the project as a scene in json format + one or more atlases (which it collects itself) and plists for them with a description of the sprites. Everything you need for such basic things. You can also insert particles into animations. Only this studio is a little buggy.
As for the creation of a specific level in the game, then you need to think over the game mechanics and build on it. If a level cannot be created using existing tools (and most likely it will), then the gameplay logic should be described: select the main objects, describe their interaction, determine which of them and what exactly should change from level to level and load them into external file (you can use regular plists, which are easily parsed into dictionaries, or you can use scripts, coco2dx supports lua, but I haven't done it yet). This will allow division of labor (one person can write a script for a specific level, the other one can complete the logic), it is easy to change parameters and balance levels without rebuilding the build, and in general - this is a common practice.