Made With Corona gallery

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

I’ve posted this on the Slack but thought I should probably post here as well.

I’ve started setting up a simple Made With Corona gallery to showcase all the varied games that can be made to try to ensure we get some new blood after the Corona Labs handover, I figure the more devs using the engine the higher chance it’ll succeed.

This isn’t exactly a new idea but figured it’s the least I can do right now to try to help.

I don’t have a proper url yet because madewithcorona.com is already taken, as is corona.games, so if anyone else has any ideas for a name please speak up. poweredbycorona.com?

The current version is live here - https://grahamranson.com/domains/madewithcorona/ - there are issues and unfinished things, I just wanted to get a basic version up.

If you want to have your games up there please send me the assets listed here - https://grahamranson.com/domains/madewithcorona/developers - it’s being done manually at present in spare time so submissions will be slow. A submission form will be created eventually.

Eventually I hope there will be a new official Corona website set up by someone vastly more competent in web stuff than me and then they can pull games from the site to highlight some/all on there.

I’ve put in a basic api to do that, for instance here are all the games on there - 

https://www.grahamranson.com/domains/madewithcorona/api/game

Here’s a specific game - https://www.grahamranson.com/domains/madewithcorona/api/game?id=1
 

Here are the “adventure” games - https://www.grahamranson.com/domains/madewithcorona/api/game?genre=adventure ( the showcase is a little adventure heavy right now )

And here are all the developers so far - https://www.grahamranson.com/domains/madewithcorona/api/developer

All feedback is appreciated.

#2

Thanks for starting that Graham … great idea.

#3

Excellent. We were going to add a ‘made with Corona’ section to our marketplace but since you’ve got that in hand already it takes a nice chunk of admin work out of the equation at this end :smirk:.

Love that you’re building an API in. I’ll have a think about integration options using that, but I don’t want to do anything that renders your own site useless…

#4

actually. . . I own madewithcorona.com

I nabbed some urls a while back thinking we would need to do this at some point.

Graham, I cab route it wherever you like!  I started the same project last year and got very few submissions.  At the moment, there is a lot of activity around the community and I think people are motivated to make it happen.  I’m thrilled you finished Veritas so now you can do all kinds of free stuff for the rest of us like make our websites and give us cool code libraries  :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

Thanks! Hopefully it will take off as there are so many great games and possibilities with Corona we really need the world to know.

Haha, it was seeing your posts about your store that made me get off my butt and start working on this properly. I’ve been wanting to do something like it for a while but just never had the time/energy.

Please integrate as much as you like yea! Although at present the API is very open to change so I wouldn’t start on anything quite yet :slight_smile: I’m very known for breaking things.

Oh that’s awesome! I’ll happily buy it off you ( once I work out how that’s done ) or yea you can just redirect if you prefer. All options are fine!

Yea I’m hoping there is now a bit more of a push for this sort of thing. If the engine is going to essentially be community ran it really needs the support of the community.

Haha, the worst words I always seem to utter are “I could probably do that”. That’s how so many of my projects ( lime in particular ) start. So this may in fact be beyond my abilities but I’ll certainly try. And any eagle eyed readers may have noticed the “Scrappy Ferret Ltd” bit at the bottom - that is my new side-project company that I will be using for little prototypes/broken games/libraries etc in the future.

Just to keep my broken things away from Glitch. There are enough of my broken things there already.

Edit: There’s no point in actually clicking the Scrappy Ferret link though, it just goes to a placeholder, and equally broken, website.

#6

Glad to have sparked some motivation. This is the right time for projects like this to pop up and I do hope to see other announcements in the coming weeks.

Something else I was thinking about, but won’t have the time to work on myself any time soon, was a community centric ad network. Basically a plugin that just loads in random adverts from a central repository. Each fetch could add 1 credit to your own account, and each time your own advert is shown a credit could be deducted. Effectively you’d earn impressions by showing other adverts instead of by paying for them. Then it’s just a case of sometimes showing a community ad to earn a credit, and sometimes showing another ad network ad to earn some money. Seems to me this would be a great way for everybody here to get a bit of initial exposure without needing a marketing budget, although there would of course need to be guidelines on what kind of adverts are acceptable, and probably a category system that individual developers can opt into displaying adverts from.

If anybody likes this idea and wants to take it up, please do.

#7

In my head I just said “I could probably do that” but then I had to stop myself. Not again.

I’ve started putting together a form for submissions, doesn’t actually function yet though. https://grahamranson.com/domains/madewithcorona/developers

It’s been correctly pointed out on Slack that this is a lot of assets and info required and thus a lot of effort for already busy devs to submit and I’m not sure what to do.

It was suggested to simply link to the various stores and as such not require a lot of info to be submitted and instead people can just view through those, however that would still require at least 1 image to be submitted ( the cover image, which will probably be the only bespoke bit of art required sizing wise ) and the rest would be copy and pasted, so not sure if it would actually save time?

Having store links on there would be great though either way, basically just not sure what other info would also be wanted/needed. I just figure anyone viewing the site to see what games can be made, might not want to then have to view the games on the store to get an idea of what it is. But maybe I’m wrong and less is better?

#8

A “submit your url” and then we’ll scrape the play/app store for the assets shouldn’t be that difficult?  After all, that’s what all the APK sites do.  Sure Ric can code a little web-scraper?

I wrote a Google shopping scraper a while ago (to automatically harvest competitor pricing) and that was fairly basic.  But time is something I don’t have much of.

#9

The trick with these things is to just make as many fields as possible be optional, and ideally, have only the mandatory fields show on initial use.

Look at Facebook as a brilliant example - there are tonnes and tonnes of things that you can fill out once logged in to populate your profile, but they don’t ask for any of this during registration. Land on the site for the first time and all you have to fill out is a name, email address, and password. Their system waits until you’ve signed up and gone into your profile before throwing any more options at you. It’s a psychological trick - land on a form that looks really simple to fill out and you probably will, then when you see more fields you’re already invested. Land on a form that looks cumbersome and you won’t even make a start on it.

@SGS is right though - if you can scrape, do. For something like this, my approach would be to start with just the the one field - “Enter your Google / iOS store url” and an “I don’t have one yet” button. If they fill in the field, scrape what you can from that url to pre-populate the fields, and if they hit the button just show the fields unpopulated. Title, description, images, etc can likely all be pulled in but keep them editable so that the user can swap things out if necessary.

If you’re building this in PHP, https://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.io/ is an excellent library. Use it to pull a url and it’ll become a dom object that you can search through pretty much the same way you can with jQuery.

#10

Scraping is a great idea yea. 

I’ll then steal Richard’s idea of yea having just the scrape button visible at first, then it’ll populate the form allowing you to edit what is needed.

#11

I’m sure that was my idea…  :wink:

#12

Haha yea, I mean I’ll first steal your idea of scraping and then I’ll mix it with Richard’s idea of only having the scrape button visible at first until the scrape happens to make the form seem less intimidating.

Very early start but it will currently pull a few bits of info from a google play listing

#13

I can now pull all the “required” info from a Google Play listing, and all bar Genre, Developer Email, and Cover Image from an App Store listing.

None of these will get a Developer Logo though so will probably just make that an optional thing.

You can’t actually submit anything yet but if anyone has a second to plug their store listing url into the form here and tell me what it spits out that’d be great!

https://www.grahamranson.com/domains/madewithcorona/developers

#14

Generally worked well but it squished the game cover image.  Suggest you use a standard HD resolution for that.

#15

@Graham I tried it and it worked fine except for the game cover as mentioned above. My app is only on Apple App store for now and it wouldn’t let me finish unless I put in a valid Google Play url. I am not sure about email requirement - do you plan to make it public? Perhaps this should have a separate forum key, but more devs will get involved here for sure.

#16

@sgs yea at present it’s just swishing down the first screenshot so will adjust the size to work better.

@Odisej right now it won’t actually submit anything to the database, I’m just testing the scraping. When that’s all working fine I’ll open up the database for actual submissions. Thanks for testing it for me!

#17

Submissions are now _partially _open however the site is still very much in alpha so things will still be broken / subject to change.

Simply go here and enter your Google Play or App Store url then hit “Scrape”.

Google Play will pull in a couple extra fields, Genre and Email, that App Store pages can’t ( yet ).

You should still be able to edit all the other fields, apart from the description and assets ( again, yet ) so just leave them as is.

#18

Just a quick update to say that in theory you can now change the image assets after scraping ( or from the beginning if creating from scratch ) and it should hopefully work.

#19

I believe Mac App Store scraping will now work as well, for the 3 developers that use that :slight_smile:

#20

Just bumping this so more people see it.