Another week with Lua while drinking Corona [SDK].

For the past week, I continued working on my casual game with CoronaSDK but most of the time was actually spent on learning more Lua in depth and I’ve been liking it very much. Lua is a [seemingly] simple language to learn, heck it’s a dynamic language and it’s almost hard to shoot yourself in the foot, with a Shotgun or so, easily but mastering is something else because it’s just when you read about it in depth that it shows it’s true self.

It’s a very powerful language, I like the dynamic features of it a lot. As most of my experience was with Compiled languages, such as C-family languages, even though I made a complete game with Flash, which uses ActionScript3 and is a dynamic language, I’m still learning new things with Lua because I don’t have to dabble with Flash and can utilize a much more development environment. I had experience with Python as well on Garshasp video game on my technical art parts but I can bravely say that I’m just finding out about true powers of a dynamic language now that I’m thinking to utilize it to boost performance as best as I can since I’m developing on mobile (iOS/Android) here.

One of the most interesting topics is doing OOP in Lua where there are several debates on how to do so and most of them valid because it relates on the platform that you are actually coding and developing on.

Not this kind of Corona of course! 😀

So it’s been a good journey so far but it doesn’t leave me unwilling to wish for working with Corona and that is lack of tools on Windows. Since Corona is mostly used for iOS/Android developers, most of them guys have Mac computers so most of the development environments that exists for Corona, at least good ones, are in Mac. (got my Southern English joke there? :D). And since I’m STILL yet to get my hungry paws on my MacBook Pro, I had to check every possible configuration available on Windows and I can safely say that none of them worked for me. Don’t get me wrong, Corona is a great SDK but you need a proper IDE to be able to code productively for it and none of the Windows solutions are competent enough. Another aspect is the level editor that is simply hard to find and I don’t like any of solutions here as well. There are far better solutions on Mac like Game Helper toolset but I’m yet to try them but they seem and look great.

So I’m continuing my journey with Corona and Lua and will report back here.

I also got some emails regarding Unity for 2D. I tried to reply them as best that I can but I’m also writing a post about it in extent so stay tuned.

As of this week, my courses at Iran National Game Development Institute (IranGDI) resumes and I’m very looking forward to meet my pupils again, as well as new ones that I’m looking forward to meet. I’ll be teaching Digital Game Design along with my best friend, great colleague and a great artist, Hossein Hosseinian, along with that I will hold Scripting Class to extend journey of students of past semester to learn how to write scripts (along with way more stuff!) and extend their abilities with Game Maker that hopefully they can apply on any other engine as well. It’s still in talks but it’s highly likely that I’ll be holding a class called Game Psychology which I’ll talk about psychology of games in general and try to tie video game there. It will be for first semester of University of Video Games that just started to work and I’m very passionate about.

So that’s it for now!

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