Using Cocos2d has been very good for the moment. It's very easy to get things up and running and moving about on the screen. The only thing it doesn't have initially inbuilt is a connection to the interface builder that is within Xcode. The builder lets you build menus using a graphical user interface and link things together with clicking and dragging instead of writing code. It's a little fiddly at first but there's plenty of tutorials out there which is good because I'm still not that good at it.
I was lucky to find a tutorial on how to combine Cocos2D with an interface builder interface and so now I have a menu before I have my little tech demo. You can see the tutorial here: http://www.raywenderlich.com/4817/how-to-integrate-cocos2d-and-uikit. This will become very handy as our SHMUP game will have a lot of menus and I need to get used to it all.
