From The Blog: Corona Labs annual update

Getting Started Announcements
#41

Thank you Corona team for your work over the past years.

I am a bit confused about who will maintain the open source code.

Doesn’t the open source project need an owner who decides what goes into the engine and what doesn’t? If so, who will that be?

Do we know how many different users are actively using the server? If the number is large enough, it might be feasible to introduce a small monthly fee for using the build server to allow the development to continue. If the fee is small, even the hobbiest would be willing to pay it to allow the platform to continue.

#42

You are never too old to learn.  I am probably older than you.

For me… my current Corona apps are in “support” mode (no new features) while I move over to Unity.  For my 1 non-game app, I may be able to keep this in Corona (depending on what happens) or move over to another product.  

There are a lot of 2D game engines you can try (some using Lua) to see what works for you, you can stick it out with Corona (again, depending on future updates), or you can jump into Unity/Unreal and develop a 2D, or possible an enhanced 3D version of your game.

–john

#43

I was thinking about Richard’s suggestion of setting up a new centralised store for the plugins. While I applaud Richard’s initiative and I see many benefits to it, I think that there might be a much simpler and a better alternative.

When the new website is created, then the best way to approach this issue would be to create an “assets” or “plugins” page, similar to https://defold.com/assets/. Defold’s asset page approximate structure and design would be quick and easy to replicate. It would keep the assets/plugins easy to find in a centralised location and it wouldn’t increase the server upkeep costs.

Developers who’d want to monetise their plugins would simply place a link on their asset/plugin page that directs users to whatever store they want to use or even just their GitHub page with free and open source content. Corona, or rather Appodeal, wouldn’t need to handle any transactions, support any kind of marketplace infrastructure or even host the assets or plugins.

This would mean that the new centralised asset/plugin “store” would really just be a product catalog. With no single organisation managing the sale and distribution of the assets/plugins, we’d really embrace the openness and there wouldn’t be a risk of someone just shutting down their store and leaving all asset/plugin developers stranded.

#44

We are long-time Corona users as well (since about 2012). This is sad news. It has really been a fine development environments – and all of you engineers, you code warriors and you staff members that have made it so good . . . you each deserve our thanks! Many of us have been fortunate enough to earn livings from our Corona-built apps. You have facilitated that.

I wish Rob, Vlad, and everyone at Corona the best. I do wish some of the fine folks will continue to contribute to the SDK. As others have said, I don’t have the expertise to keep the SDK alive with new code, but I can contribute financially if it looks like that is a viable investment. 

 

I’ll be following everyone’s comments closely in coming months. We have all been in this together for a long time. Now we need to find the best path forward.

 

Very best;

 

Steve Bullock

#45
#46

Can you share with us which cross platform tools you know of that use Lua?
Thank you.

#47

The problem with anything other than a centralised store is that it wouldn’t be clear to customers when an update is available, unless they’re constantly monitoring the forums, and plugin vendors post update notifications every single time.

With a centralised store we can have email notifications send automatically to customers when a plugin they’re using receives an update, and longer term we could even update the simulator to automatically fetch updates to plugins exactly like it does currently with the Coronalabs system.

The other advantage would be revenue. I’m not going to pretend we wouldn’t want to monetise this for our own pockets, but if we’re making money from the marketplace it would be very much in our interests for Corona SDK to remain an actively used product, and the best way to do that would be to give some of these earnings back into it. Revenue generated by the store could be used to help fund both core development, and marketing campaigns.

If on the other hand everybody just moved their plugins and templates to other sales platforms, the revenue taken by those platforms is never coming back to the community.

#48

Farewell Corona. This was not unexpected but it was a punch in the gut to read.

We published over 15 full length games with Corona and even got an Editor’s Choice on Google Play for one of them. With millions of downloads we made a living from our games, even though we were just messing around and having fun when we started. A special thanks to Rob and Vlad, Rob made this community and you can tell Vlad still cares and would like to go the Patreon route.

We started the huge task of porting our games and game engine to Unity about 9 months ago because, as many have said already, the writing had been on the wall for a long time. We’re programmers by background so Unity was not a concern (and we’re getting more into 3D), but for those that are looking to port your 2D games you may want to consider Game Maker Studio as a closer match to Corona.

Wishing everyone the best of luck in continuing their projects, businesses, and development. Thanks again Rob for making Corona a community.

#49

I keep thinking that with so much support from so many active users, Corona can’t die, surely. I don’t know the usage figures or the numbers of people who would fall into the “yes I would definitely pay a subscription fee” camp, but surely someone, somewhere, must see an opportunity to take this on as a genuine business opportunity through charging for the software.

Lower fees / a free version for casual users, students etc. and higher fees for those of us making a living from our Corona apps doesn’t seem like a crazy idea does it…? Sadly we don’t have the expertise ourselves, but would gladly contribute financially if there were any guarantees made around ensuring support for future Apple / Android updates.

The way everyone is talking though, it seems like a lot of folks have either already looked elsewhere or are doing so at this stage.

So I guess the next question I have is recommendations for alternatives.

Unity looks like a fantastic option in many ways, especially in terms of not ending up in this kind of situation again, but for reasonably straightforward 2D games, is that like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut? Fine with the cost if it guarantees long term support but learning curve? We have 20 years of programming experience so not phased by working with other languages, but preference would be for an easier port of existing code / shallower learning curve if possible.

After that it gets more difficult to find an obvious choice that has the long term guarantee of being viable in 3 or 4 years.

  • Godot is one option I’ve seen mentioned and looks to have an impressive array of features.
  • Game Maker Studio mentioned by Fire Rabbit
  • Construct keeps popping up

There are tonnes of options. If anyone has any strong views on what might be worth looking into as a priority that would be a great help.

Deal breakers for us are a good 2d graphics engine, network capabilities for sending / receiving data from a remote server, sqlite support, security and a decent audio library including recording via the microphone. Ability to publish for iOS and Android essential. Other platforms a bonus.

One thing that would make big difference for us is understanding whether an update made in another SDK to an existing app made in Corona would be able to tap into the sqlite database already stored in the documents directory by our Corona app so as to maintain progress made within the app so far. Anyone see any potential issues with that? The answer to that I imagine would be helpful to lots of us using sqlite to store game data.

Thanks.

#50

looking for alternatives is understandable but for many of us it’s quite difficult at this point to port what we’ve done in terms of time and finance. next month we’ll attend gdc and try to struck a deal with publishers, it’s so hard to move forward in a situation like this :frowning: so, for me it is critical corona being updated to meet requirements of platforms like android or apple. once again i want to state that we are ready to support by any means.

#51

I’d love to stay with Corona, having used it since 2010 and just about to re-release an app and build a follow up on my same platform. But, if I have to move it’s looking more and more like Unity 3D might be the way to go for the following reasons:

  1. Stable company

  2. Diverse platform support

  3. Large developer community

  4. Standard programming language (C#), not a proprietary language

  5. Reasonable cost

I’m not so concerned about it being overkill.

Please feel to chime in with your opinions. I think we all need to at last consider all our options.

#52

@Richard, I agree that update notifications is one of the great benefits of having a single centralised store. But there still remains the matter that if the new store wouldn’t be profitable, or profitable enough, then like with Corona Labs, QWeb would close it down, at which point the third party plugins and assets would again be without a home, like they soon will be. By using the catalog approach, there only way that the asset/plugin catalog would be lost again would be if the main Corona site would be closed.

The profits from asset/plugin sales would come back to their developers, i.e. part of the community any way. The matter of how much they’d be willing to invest in the core development would be a different matter with both approaches. I would argue that marketing budget is out of the question these days.

#53

I’m not throwing in the towel yet!  I was thrilled to hear that Vlad wants to continue working on the platform and I believe there are enough of us to get a good start on Patreon.  I’ve been experimenting with other game engines this past year but really prefer Corona.  I’m excited to move forward despite the challenges but, as they say in Monty Python, “We’re not dead yet!”.

#54

Fair point ref individual developers giving back some of their earnings from plugin sales. I hadn’t considered that myself to be honest. I suppose how much would be a feasible return would be subject to how much commission the sales platform takes, but every little helps.

Ref QWeb closing down the replacement store if it isn’t successful - I can’t imagine that being a possibility really. We’re already paying for our servers etc, so the additional costs for running the store are marginal. It’s the development time that will be the most costly aspect, and by the time we launch, that’d be mostly done with. Hence needing to build a picture of how much interest there would be in this before diving in.

#55

I also hope CORONA will live on. As long as it is alive and you can build for Android and iOS I will use and support it.

The only thing it should have is admob integration and working IAPs for the stores :wink:

Is anybody have some details about this METAL requirement by Apple? Is it a fact iOS14 will be such a huge game changer?

And if so… is it even possible for Corona (and willing/able devs) to deliver such a drastic change?

#56

No one knows yet, and we won’t until June when iOS 14 beta comes out. Worst case is OpenGL is removed, and since it’s been deprecated 2 years now it’s possible. That would give vlad about 3 months to transition over before iOS 14 would launch in September. I think it’s possible but would be a pretty heroic feat. Hopefully he can get started earlier. And ideally it doesn’t get removed until iOS 15 and we have lots of time to move off OpenGL.

Having the resources to move off OpenGL is by far the biggest threat to Corona surviving so hopefully is next in line after moving everything off the build servers.

#57

For those looking for the most direct 2D conversion, I’d recommend Game Make Studio.  Game Maker Studio is very 2D focused and has a scripting language that is comparable to Lua/Corona.  They also have a healthy, large, and helpful community. There are tonnes of tutorials online for doing nearly anything.  We strongly considered it before choosing Unity, but we have 3D ambitions and have the programming backgrounds to take on the complexity and challenges of Unity. Unity is not for everyone.

Game Maker Studio was also the platform for some mega indie hits.  Anyone play these?

  • Undertale: 2.5 million steam owners. …
  • Hotline Miami: 2.2 million steam owners. …
  • Risk of Rain: 1.5 million steam owners. …
  • Gunpoint: 800k steam owners. …
  • Nidhogg: 670K steam owners. …
  • Nuclear Throne: 500K steam owners. …
  • Hyper Light Drifter: 400K steam owners.

 

Godot I hear is good, open source, and sometimes brought up as an alternative to Unity.  They were a bit too young for us to consider.  I’ve heard mixed things but I wouldn’t say Godot is as easy to use as Corona or Game Maker Studio is.  Construct I never heard of, thanks for sharing.  All of these alternatives are cross platform.

#58

No real reasons to switch from Corona as of now, so I’m staying. :) 

Unity is just an awful mess to me, and UE4 is pretty meh when it comes to 2D, so if I were to switch to something with an editor despite hating those, I’d go for Game Maker Studio 2. It was the least revolting to me out of the three after some basic tinkering.

Stuff like LÖVE and MonoGame is also neat due to the overall workflow being a lot more like Corona’s, so those would be most likely replacements for me.

Assuming the worst - where will you go after Corona?
#59

kbradford is right in that the OpenGL question is a complete mystery. Even though Apple already deprecated it a long time ago, but there’s no knowing how long it may still work. It could still be hanging around for the next 3 years or we’ll learn that it’ll stop working come September.

It really just comes down to how many apps are still using OpenGL. When Apple decides to completely stop supporting OpenGL, it means that all App Store apps using it would be removed. As long as that number remains high enough, Apple won’t have the incentive to do so. This is purely a guess, but I would wager we still have until September of 2021. Still, the sooner this is addressed, the better.

But, one thing that I believe most of us would agree on is that we’d like to hear from Vlad (and other Corona engineers, if there are any,) and hear of their plans and whether or not they’d be interested in a Patreon arrangement or something along those lines.

#60

It’s a few less popular ones. The most used is a “glossary” app for learning a foreign language words with a “game” in different levels, mainly for kids. You can register and save your own lists of words to the cloud etc, but it can also be used without registering.

The teacher can create lists and a QR code (that is included in the “week plan”) and that the kids can scan to start a game. Seems to be popular in Norway where I live.

So it’s a mix of game (2D engine is used a lot)  and a “business app” (in the sense that there are some text input and list of saved games that can be downloaded etc).

So I need:

  • 2D gfx engine

  • QR reading capability

  • Text speech capability