For me, scripting with Lua in the Corona SDK has been an incredible way to learn some fundamental programming skills. I’ve adopted a “fail early, fail often” mindset of rapid iteration and this has been infinitely more authentic learning experience than the contrived university programming courses I’ve taken.
So I would encourage anyone to dive right in and start experimenting with the sample projects provided. There are some really robust projects available from the community as well.
Although I signed up with a subscription late last year, I’ve only had the chance to focus on the SDK this last month. In four weeks I’ve gone from being a total noob at scripting to having generated the core systems/functionality of my first game. I’m even on the brink of bending the Storyboard API to my will (the one Corona system that has really challenged me).
Corona is the ultimate “Lean” development tool. Only a month in and I feel completely empowered to make any one of a number of projects I have in mind. I come from a AAA game dev background and that, to my mind, is bananas…
Although Corona is “user friendly” in general, there are a few things I think the company could do to make it more accessible for people who have zero background in programming (might be a great way to increase the user base!!!).
The impeding level designer tool looks like that will be a step in that direction. I would also like to see some super entry level information regarding working with Lua. An example of what I mean by that is I think it would be great to go in deep on tables. It seems to me that pretty much anything in Lua gets stored in a table and understanding how to work well with tables would would accelerate the learning of any new user. Another concept that I’d like to see highlighted for newbies is the concept of variable scope. For a long time I thought “local” just meant local to the file I was in. It took lots of trial and error to understand that local is local to the level the item is at in the code (so if a variable is local in a function it’s only available in that level or deeper in the function).
There are now enough really nice tutorials on the blog that a user can do some investigation and piece together how the major systems work (the blog tutorials are *great*). If I weren’t frantic to get some results I would better enjoy a slow pace of reading up on things.
This has become a bit of ramble but in short, I would encourage anyone to dive right in. I can’t believe how much I’ve learned in the last four weeks. I really wish Corona the best. Their vision of rapid development for 2D games/products is perfect in the context of postmodern game development [import]uid: 105707 topic_id: 20256 reply_id: 118754[/import]
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