If you are starting from scratch like I did maybe this list of things you need to learn how to do might be helpful or might even scare you off. I don’t know. I went into this completely blind thinking I could create a game in 3 months. 3 years later here we are. You definitely can’t be a quitter. I would consider myself an app developer now. Of course that is my own evaluation. But for newbies your trek might be like mine, hopefully faster, but take a look at this and you will at least see what you need to learn how to do.
1. Learn Lua: Lua is the easiest language there is I think. That is one of the things that attracted me to this SDK. Depending on your skill level to start out with this might take 1 month or 5 months.
2. Learn lua modules: When you start coding you will just have one big program. After about 5000 lines of code this will become totally unmanageable. So you will have to start splitting code into modules to make sense of it. I hear there is a 200 limit on local variables so you might hit that as well if you code one giant module.
3. LUA OOP strategy: When I started coding, even using modules, I got to the point where I could not contain the code complexity. Something needed to change or I would never be able to debug the code and I there was just too much duplicate similar code that needed to be maintained. I came up with my own strategy but there are many ways to crack this nut. I am sure the one I came up with is not the best, but that is topic for another forum entry.
4. Just keep coding: At first it will be impossible to do almost anything. For example, how do you store game stats? How do you handle screen changes? How do you define and ingest level data? How do you do garbage collection? I found it very frustrating spending a month on some kind of minutia that didn’t really drive the ball forward much. But once you have it figured out you can use it over and over in other situations.
5. Learn the SDK: This will take months as well unless you have worked on some other game platform which you will bring some skill across from there. Start with all the examples, they are great. However, they just show you how to do this thing or that. They don’t really put things into a coherent game. Maybe investing in some kind of template would be a good idea. I tried looking at other people’s code and had very little luck understanding other people’s coding methods. Maybe because I haven’t fully completed step 1 yet. 
6. Produce something simple: The first thing you do should be very simple. In my case, I produced a calculator that I expected nobody to need or buy. But it let me see the whole process of putting a game in an app store, which is not trivial in and of itself. Apple would never accept my calculator because they said it was not worthy. However, I did manage to get it in the Google and Amazon stores. In 3 years, 80 people have bought it in the google store and 264 in the Amazon store. So from that I figure people on Amazon are more willing to pay for stuff than google.
7. Learn Photoshop: Now that you have mastered 1-6 you still don’t have anything to push around the screen. If you think about it that is all a game does is move things around the screen. Youtube is your friend here. There are examples of how to do anything.
8. Sprite creation: Learning photoshop wont help you much here. You need to be a good enough artist to make sequences of pictures that form and simulate movement. In my case, every creature in my game had a sprite sheet that consisted of 96 frames. These 96 frames would be spit into different types of movements such as swim, dance, turn, rotate etc. It depends on the creature what I would want it to do. Thinking of the woman power needed to create this it is impossible to do this by hand in photoshop or even illustrator. I have over 50 separate game elements, not including the backgrounds, That is 4800 pictures I would have to draw. That is just impossible by hand in my opinion.
9. Texture packer: Once you have created your 50 sprites you need to spend 30 bucks and buy texture packer. You will be glad you did.
10. Physics editor: Corona has a ridiculous restriction that a polygon can only be defined by 5 points. To get around this issue you have to glue multiple polygons together to make complex structures. Physics editor does this for you.
11. Blender: Because I am not really an artist I needed something that would create 3d art for me. I beat my head against all the Adobe products for 3 months before I discovered blender. Then I beat my head against blender for over a year learning it. I am still no expert. But with blender you can do things like:
– 3d modeling
– texturing
– rigging (this is a process of putting bones in a module to enable movement)
– animation
The best thing about it, is that it is programmatic. I would create a creature, animate it and put it in my game. Then find I don’t like it or get bad feedback from my family. If I was hand drawing this stuff I would have to start over, not good! With blender I just change some colors, textures or movements and re render the 96 frames. Even this takes time. My 6 year old laptop takes 12 hours to render things sometimes. Even if I ain’t doing it, it still takes time waiting on it.
12. Game design: I wont say much about this. Even if you have spent the last 2 years mastering steps 1 thru 11 you still don’t know how to make a game. This is like the difference between knowing how to write and being a published author. They are very different skill sets.
13. Creating sounds: My game was silent for 2 years and when I added sounds it took it to another level. This was some of the funnest part of making the game. I download a simple recording tool on my old phone and went around the house recording things. My dog makes 2 of the sounds used in the game. Snoring and licking. He is really good at both of those activities. Once I had the rough sounds I edited them in Audacity which is a free tool you can download. It worked great.
14. Publishing: This is the process of putting your app in the each store. There are many, but the main mobile app stores are Itunes connect, Google Play and Amazon. This in itself can take at least a week. First you have to create a compelling icon. Back to photoshop for this. Then you will have to convert that icon into various sizes for no reason at all than the app stores are lazy. They could easily take a 1024 by 1024 icon and generate all the sizes they need. But they don’t. They make you make every different size of them. Then you need screen shots in both phone shape and ipad shape. These will be different because the aspect ratios of the various devices move the buttons around on your game. You will need at least 5. You will also need to create banners for the various app stores in various sizes. None of this is hard but it is annoying and time consuming. Next you will need to create a 1.5 to 2 minute movie showing your game in action. These vary in impressiveness from what I have seen. The simplest is just a guy playing the game for 2 minutes and then others are extremely high quality that look like they were done by a production studio. If you don’t have any Apple hardware you will need at least 2 things. Some kind of computer running MacOS and at least one device. This can be a phone, ipad, whatever. Of course if you have to buy these, this could end up costing your 2k just to build your app on Apple.
Lastly, you will need some kind of web presence to list in these app stores. This can either be a company domain, or some free site that you have re-purposed for your company. For example Facebook for business.
This is a lot of stuff. If you haven’t done any of it before plan on a couple of weeks to figure it all out.
15. Marketing: My app has been sitting in the app store for 2 weeks and I have sold around 25. Not quite taking the world by storm yet. So I am going to start looking at marketing. When I have it figured out I will post more. For now everyone who reads this must go buy it and submit an awesome review. I don’t care if you play it or not. :) If anyone knows how to hack Justin Bieber’s twitter account that would be awesome as well.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dolphin-diner/id1323579671?mt=8
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gmail.laurasweet8888.DolphinDiner
So after a month of having my game out at 99 cents I have only sold around 35. So far this whole journey has been a total waist of time. You would think that at least the people reading this post would take the time to buy it and donate 99 cents to the cause but alas, no. The age of free has consumed us all.
The next thing I have tried is a Facebook ad which I ran for 2 weeks and it did absolutely nothing other than generate impressions. Next I am going to try a sale just to see if even free will drive the download numbers up so that the game at least shows up better on searches. Stay tuned.
In the end it was the learning experience that kept me going and when I got stuck the guys on this forum helped me out greatly, specifically, Ed. I appreciate the support and hope this overview helps others understand the challenges of becoming a game designer.