Multimedia Musings

I have been working with the Corona SDK. I came across it while reading an article about becoming a millionaire in the app store . On my job, I have been using both Unity3d and Flash mostly for the desktop dev, and wanted to start doing stuff for mobile at night before I introduced it to the team. To publish in Unity, I would have to buy a license for each platform I want to target. This is fine if my company is paying, but scary if I am footing the bill as an indie.  For Flash, they have an open source option, but that option is still baking. So I decided to give Corona a try. Boy was I surprised.

You can download and dev with Corona using an unlimited trial. When you are ready to publish it is simply $350 for ALL the platforms (iOS, Android, Kindle, Nook). Corona is strictly 2D for the moment (2.5D future?), and from what I understand, native support is not 100% there, but for games and apps that don’t require device specific features, that is not a show stopper. Development in it feels a lot like Flash with its event driven environment. I am still getting used to Lua, but I am really liking it.

I was up and running in no time. Corona simply works, and for my first forays in mobile it is more than adequate. Developing for mobile really feels like developing for the PC 15 years ago. You are forced to really be frugal and minimalistically creative with your graphics and memory usage. Techniques like tile mapping, swapping and side scrolling are back and neo retro games are in vogue. The Corona SDK takes care of much of the overhead for you so that you can concentrate more on design than dealing with low level functionality. All in all, it is a pretty enjoyable environment to work with.

-DCF

0 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.