Photics, I 100% agree with you. We are a small team, and while there is no problem in coding in Objective-C, we were planning on binding Lua for faster development cycles. So Corona might seem a no-brainer if you are into 2D game development.
We played with Corona for the first time a few weeks ago for a client that asked us our opinion on the framework. Corona SDK seems very well designed, it is clearly documented, and can indeed speed up the development of your 2D games tremendously, there is little doubt about that - and people with real-life experience (unlike us) on the iOS marketplace have already written about this, so there is no reason for me to expand on this point.
Once again, one of the limits of the platform, for us, is the impossibility to add your own Objective-C classes. This is a problem especially if you are a programmer with already some work done on previous games or on client projects (our case) - or if you are used to develop on Mac platforms. But this problem can be of secondary importance IF the framework covers most or all the most needed features of the iOS platform, and it is counter-balanced by the possibility of developing an application for multiple platforms maintaining one codebase. This is so invaluable if your team is small or if you are working alone on your games.
What truly worries me is the lack of some features in the current version of Corona. I am speaking of iAd, Game Center, and in-app purchases (which I know are coming in the next build - but isn’t it a bit late?). I am 100% sure these will be added in the next future, so I am not saying the developers of Corona will not add them, but I am sincerely interested in knowing the reasons why these were not taken care of first. I am sure these must be technical reasons - could Carlos or others answer this?
In fact, the lack of such crucial features for monetization might make some think that Corona is targeting only the hobbyist market.
Yes, I see also the Game Center as fundamental for monetization because it helps spread awareness that your game is out there - OpenFeint can do the same, but it is a bit clumsy and slow in comparison to the Game Center ( and threads on websites like Touch Arcade seem to show that players are thinking along these lines as well).
In the end, I think we will use CoronaSDK for some of our projects, so I hope to be able to write in more detail about our experience with actually using the platform on something tangible (appropriate for touch games!) in the next future.
But I would certainly appreciate some feedback. [import]uid: 13836 topic_id: 4917 reply_id: 16735[/import]
