From The Blog: Corona Labs annual update

Getting Started Announcements
#141

As a game journalist for more than ten years, I had seen many crowdfunding/donation campaigns: from content creators to game developers. If I can help at least somehow, then I will do it now.

You should already begin to inform the main customers about the transition to the donation system: write them e-mail, PM to social network accounts. The more important for them is to see:

  • who will be “project manager”, a man who will work with gamedevs and engine developer community
  • who will continue updating and developing Corona (and their personal donations pages, or common page)
  • a clear dots: how much will cost staying Corona alive (monthly support for android, iOS) and monthly extended support (windows, consoles), who will provide support/update.
  • clear roadmap, how you think to continue, what features you could add and how costly it will be.

  1. If I understood correctly, the current infrastructure exists only 2 months. Use this period to inform as many people as possible - post an update on the main page of the site and on the forum, in your social networks.

  2. Start to take donations now, this process ALWAYS has issues with credit cards, expiration date, money transfer, and cashout. You need to create a crowd, and it will not come together at the click of a finger. Use this 2 months for all such things.

  3. As I understand, in the new conditions there will be no general project management, and its active participants are scattered across different locations. It’s not very good. Yes, the Corona сore can finance the developers of the engine, but who will pay for hosting of the site and forum, other project infrastructure?

Perhaps you should make a page about Corona in Patreon, the money from which will go to pay for any common things. And the engine developers will collect donations on Github.

  1. Who remains in the Corona project? Decide as soon as possible. I saw Vlad’s Github page and I can say that his goals are quite reachable. But he can’t do all alone, right? If smb in your team needs more money - probably he will not get them, or he will get them later, which may be inappropriate.

Focus on the basics. If after 1 may only 2 people will be standing behind the Corona, it will be strange to show a plan that they could not pull.

  1. Note that your personal pages reflect your personal participation in the project. Let’s say daily help on the forums is $ 100 per month. Daily work on improving/supporting the engine - $ 1000 per month. So for global things like switching to Metal, adding new platforms (Switch), it’s really better to create separate tasks with a total cost and look for additional developers on the side for faster implementation.

So main thing right now: your clients need to understand - who they should send money to support and improve the engine, and how much it will cost to support the site and forum. While the community doesn’t have full info, it’s hard to say about Corona’s future.

#142

Short-term question: 
In about 75 days (21% of a year), Corona Labs as a business closes, and, if I understand correctly, the licensed “Splash Screen” comes to an end. My license for “Splash Screen” expired two weeks ago. I need to do a small app update by June 1 at the latest. I can wait, but would prefer to do the update in March since I have an opening in my schedule. Do I need to pay $99 for a 75-day license? Thanks.

#143

Hello Rob.

Yes, I can imagine it is early But in the long run I think it would probably be good to structure the calls for help.

I started looking at the development part ; it’s going to take some time to get familiar with it all, but a really interesting period seems to be starting now.

Ok that’s good, I have a lot of love to give :slight_smile:
 

Thank you Rob. I hope you’re not going to leave the world of Corona; no doubt many of us hope so.

 

#144

Hi @fer5. Until May 1, we are still having to pay our expenses, so Splash Screen renewals are still important to us. After May 1, we will still have expenses, but hopefully less + whatever contributions can got to support the people working on the project.

Given that we are going to a voluntary support model (Patreon, GitHub contributions, etc.), it would be awesome if you continued to support Corona financially. Purchasing a splash screen control plugin helps us in that regard. If you love Corona (and in particular if you’re making money using Corona), purchasing a splash screen now would be the same as contributing to a fund raising campaign later. If you have no plans to help financially supports us voluntarily, I would wait until we put out a build without a splash screen and update after that. Keep in mind, this may be close to May 1 before we do. You can develop and test your app/game with the splash screen in the mean time.

Rob

#145

Barry here!

I haven’t posted in a long time, but I do occasionally check in here and on Slack.
I used Corona for many years in the past and miss it greatly today (javascript is ok, but LUA is more fun!).
I got to know many of the team behind it, and for a few brief months even had the honour to work with them as part of them.

So the main thing here is I want to express my gratitude for the team - hard-working and passionate is a massive understatement! Thank you all very, very much for everything you’ve done!

While this change was inevitable, it is a bit sad, but I do see some possibilities, and it has also prompted me to take a look at the state of one of the unreleased libraries I didn’t get to finish in my time at Corona years ago.
It appears to still (mostly!) work, so apart from the possibility of supporting Vlad on his quest to continue developing Corona, I’ll see if there’s still a potential need for it (no idea what has been released in the last few years!), and if I can knock it into shape I’ll happily release it on github so everyone can go in and criticise my coding :wink: I won’t say more than that because I don’t know when I’ll have time to look at it, but I’ll bump up its priority a bit with this news.

Also, I’d like to give a bonus shout-out to the community here. There’s still some really old-school users floating around, and I do cherish my time here - definitely one of the friendliest I’ve had the pleasure to be active in!

#146

Also, I’d like to give a bonus shout-out to the community here. There’s still some really old-school users floating around, and I do cherish my time here - definitely one of the friendliest I’ve had the pleasure to be active in!

rakoonic, I’m pretty sure I remember you from that old Corona irc channel!

#147

Mixed thoughts came to mind when I read the post, but I am going to be optimistic and support Corona as we transition into the next phase for our beloved engine :slight_smile: . Love the helpful posts by Rob and others in the community so really hope everyone stays on

That metal support is really needed so keep at it Vlad (also the github sponsor things says that my contributions won’t be matched at this time, maybe some criteria needs to be met still for it)

#148

You guys! Thanks so much for kind words and support. I am glad we are  now on kinda same page about Corona, and its future.

Your support is overwhelming and is a great motivation for me. To be honest I wasn’t sure if this model would work until I posted my reply yesterday, now I have full confidence that with your help Corona has bright future.

To be even more honest, now I am more confident in future of Corona than this day year ago, and I pledge to work hard so Corona would stay best game engine as we all see it.

Thank you very much. Your responses are amazing motivators for me and Rob.

There are technical challenges, but not something we can’t do or unachievable. I think we are on track with transition to offline and independent infrastructure.

#149

Have you guys thought of changing the engine’s name now that everything is about to change and the new licenses would allow for it?

Corona seems to have historic baggage, plus a beer company and a virus to compete with. If you guys ever wanted a new name, now is the time!

#150

Thank you for the GitHub Sponsor link Vlad, I’ve added myself as a contributor just to express my interest and support.  I’ll gladly increase my donation as we get closer to understanding the future plan.

To you and Rob, and everyone else who worked on Corona SDK but perhaps aren’t as publicly known: thank you, it was and still is a great product.

#151

How do they get the stats ? I believe Cocos should be somewhere on top of the list, but don’t see it.

I have been using Corona for the past 8+ years to build business apps for many clients. Other cross platforms are not so well documented, or doesn’t have  features needed for business apps. I have re-checked out others, and their features do not come close to Corona.

I have signed up in github as a sponser. 

I am able to help out in AWS S3 and EC2 as i have a bit of experience in them.

#152

I lived with the language “Lua” with the “autoplay studio” application.
And I liked it more with the “Corona” platform.
I’m sure many like me love the Corona platform.
Because of this, the Corona platform will remain forever.

I think Corona will see tremendous development thanks to the shareholders.
Sorry, I’m not a good English speaker.

#153

Iirc it’s a mix of automatic detection and manual engine/tool metadata tagging (for tools they couldn’t find a way to distinguish), not entirely sure about the former though. Tools that aren’t already added also have to be submitted manually, so aside from Cocos devs not favoring itch.io enough it could also be a matter of not being detected automatically + users not knowing about manual metadata addition or no one bothering to add Cocos to the classification in the first place. I’m quite sure that Corona actually has more projects on itch too with their owners simply not knowing about the option of adding said tag several sub-menus deep into the dashboard.

#154

Thanks for the clarifications, Vlad and Rob!.
I have more than 50 Corona games generating significant incomes, so I’ll be glad to contribute monthly.

Long live to CORONA!

#155

hey Vlad and Rob, thanks for your effort and clarifications! I am still working on great games with corona. glad that i will be able to continue!

#156

Yes, all this is well. I’m more concerned about the how long this will be maintained/updated.

And what about plugins? I currently use (and pay for) 2-3 plugins. What happens with them now? Are they free? Will they stop working?

#157

Vlad seems happy and committed to Corona, but if your business is relying on Corona then you are essentially relying on one man. He seems a decent, honourable chap but in life anything can happen that’s out of anyone’s control.

#158

For non-reoccuring plugins, we are going to set up a system where they can be downloaded from our servers (likely GitHub going forward) and **stored** locally. That is instead of downloading it every time after we check to see if you have a license for it, we will download it once Corona will use your local copy for future builds. I’m assuming we will check dates and make sure you have the latest.

Several community members are thinking out something and Vlad has some ideas. One option is to let anyone include plugins from a URL, so a Plugin developer could host their own and update their own. 

Reoccurring plugins are more of a problem and that’s a detail we are still working out.

Rob

#159

That’s true … BUT … be honest, looking back, wasn’t this the case since probably almost 2 years already and most just ignored this fact more or less consciously?

In addition, since before the new situation was communicated we even accepted the additional risk that Corona might fade away with no change of the license.

So, realistically I’d say the risks are no worse than in the recent past, you can just see them more easily.

#160

Vlad is clearly a competent developer and passionate about Corona. It seems he’s been trundling along on his own for some time now, and now that there’s openness about this he’s gained support and respect for what he’s doing, where until now there’s frankly been a lot of “why hasn’t this been done yet?” posts.

As long as Vlad can stick around and the community has his back, I think Corona has a better future now than it did last month. And presumably over time as support increases, he’d be building up a team again.

In 2020 this is just how businesses should be. Gone are the days of hiding behind a corporate identity, pretending to have more money and staff than you do, and secretly just outsourcing everything.

We’ve been relying on one man for some time now, albeit backed by Appodeal. Now it’s just official and we know to be supportive.