If you have any interest in iPhone gaming development, you must have heard of Robert Nay, the 14-year-old developer from Utah that created Bubble Ball, a physics based puzzle game that reached the top #1 free game on the App Store in a matter of days, getting well over three million downloads. Nay used Corona SDK which, according to its maker Ansca, is “is a fully hardware-accelerated game engine framework with an easy scripting API. Games will run at native speeds in OpenGL on iOS and take full advantage of hardware features like accelerometers and multitouch. Corona makes it easy to deploy assets across multiple screen resolutions, using Corona’s automatic content scaling and high-DPI asset substitution.” 

Corona SDK has a free unlimited trial: you need to purchase a license only the moment you want to publish your app to the App Store or Android marketplace.

The framework uses the Lua programming language. “Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.”

The frameworks delivers its promises: first of all on such simple projects, you get to “playtest” a lot to fine tune the game rather then deciding things up-front. Secondly, a designer-developer can get the basics of it and build games on his own, making this the prefect tool for indies. Third, with a bit of attention, you can easily build your app so that it runs fine on both iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad, scaling up smoothly to the larger screen resolutions and the different aspect ratios.

It is worth to mention that there is a competitor to Corona named GameSalad, which offers a visual environment to build the interactions between actors instead of a “barebones” code based environment. However, as for all visual tools, you really need to rely on the interface and figuring out the GUI will eventually take you about the same time as getting into the basics of Lua.

I wish to emphasize that these tools make it accessible to non-hard-core-developers tools to build games, but don’t turn you magically into a game designer. Game design needs talent, experience and knowledge. Since these tools allow you to kick start the creation of your game, the immediate result may be that a ton of crap gets produced and released into the wild. This may bring to the wrong perception that one cannot achieve quality through these frameworks.

That is wrong. These tools are pretty valid and will allow you to build a quality casual game just like many successful games you see today on the App Store. This is true for Corona.

for Corona SDK training in Singapore contact: mail@technowand.com

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