In all fairness i need to point out that i am currently on vacation and as such have spent a lot of time researching viable Corona alternatives, which quickly boiled down to watching way to many tutorial videos of Google’s flutter, and king’s defold.
What i have found is as follows.
The flutter framework and concept is really great for making business apps, but coding in the dart script language has its issues. Compared to lua i find that it seems to be both powerful yet irritatingly picky, syntax wise. Combined with flutter which consist of widgets in widgets in widgets etc, i find the code not necessarily harder to understand but more difficult to read as it gets more complex, perhaps especially when compared to lua. The idea of moving from lua to dart feels like going backwards in time, something i really don’t want to do.
Regarding making games in flutter, it does have some abilities and tools. While even more tools may be on the way, it is still all widgets, and i get the impression that’s not the best foundation for game making.
Defold, on the other hand seems very good for making games, yet lacking when it comes to making business apps. It uses lua with a game environment that reminds me of gamemaker, but after watching many videos, i get the impression it might be on par with Corona in terms of production speed. I don’t know how it is performance wise, but the king games made using it do work very well.
My conclusion at this point is therefore that the best bang for the buck for me is to continue to use Corona, and hope for a brighter future where Corona staff will find means and better ways to communicate with us devs. Corona is after all awesome and deserves to live on.
There is also something to be said about staying with what one knows, and last but not least… Happy Easter holidays everyone!
But I did learn a lot!!!
