I’ve been working with a small team to build a cross platform game leveraging the Cocos2D gaming engine on iOS. I chose this platform for a few reasons:
1) There is a really good book explaining the basics of game programming and the libraries.
2) There seems to be a good number of other people using this engine
3) The game I am working on is a turn based strategy game and this engine seems to support that
4) I wanted to create a hex based map and had read that Cocos2d supported this
5) I had heard that it is cross platform capable with Cocos2d-X

Given those four reasons I have started looking around on StackoverFlow for more information on the cross platform nature of the libraries. Previously I had only found a single wiki that talked about cocos2d-x. So I was a bit worried already.

After a bit of reading, I didn’t feel any better or any worse for that matter. The biggest concerns that I have found in my readings are as follows:
1) Cocos2d doesn’t really support hex based maps (so I’ll change my design)
2) Cocos2d-x is really a C++ wrapper which requires that you code in C++ for iOS too (doesn’t seem too painful yet)
3) Like all cross platform development this is going to be hard (and will probably take a performance hit!)

Given those three findings, I am trying to decide, is it worth starting from scratch with a cross platform game and design? Will I learn enough, so even if the game is a bomb, the overhead will be worth it?

What do you think? Do you code for multiple environments upfront, or port your app once you have a success?