Id also like to see the Corona Staff drop by and tell us what they have in the future for this SDK…
I mean i absolutely love Corona SDK and would love to stick with it but if they have plans for different thing in the future id like to know about them if its possible…
Maybe this topic can be brought up in the next or near future Corona GEEK??
Thanks and Good Luck to all!
Okay dropping in. We don’t have a published road map. We found out a couple of years ago, that it takes significant resources to keep up with Apple and Google’s changes. Every few months Apple makes a new rule that we have to adapt to to keep building. Google isn’t as frequent as Apple, but it interrupts any attempt to plan a road map, when you don’t know when you have to drop what you’re doing to to keep things modern.
Short term, finish OS-X and Desktop builds. We have HTML5 to get back to. tvOS is a framework we want to support. We are working on getting Corona Composer GUI with more functionality. After that, it becomes a case of starting to whittle down the Feature Requests at a faster pace, knock out some of the level 3-4 bugs.
Longer term, I think we are waiting to see what the industry moves toward. Mobile and Desktop are now very mature platforms. A few years ago, Mobile was new and Fresh and a great place to be pushing toward the forefront. It’s hard to know what the next big thing in the industry is. I think TV is going to be big. We are seeing TV’s made by some vendors that are straight up Android TV. Apple TV will probably be big as more people cord cut. We already have pretty good support for TV device over all, but there is obviously more that we can do in that area.
As far as the job market goes, Lua is widely used, but most of the jobs are in the game market, and there are probably not enough of them for the number of developers out there. If you want to apply what you’ve learned, get better at Lua and Corona SDK but at the same time venture out into other areas. For instance, use this as an opportunity to build an app that needs to talk to a PHP server (or Node.js) to construct some online APIs. Build a website in HTML, JavaScript and CSS to support that app.
Programming experience is experience. It all adds up. But you also have to know multiple languages. You have to know multiple environments if you want to have a good chance to get a good programming job.
Rob
We are working on getting Corona Composer GUI with more functionality.
I have always been a HUGE fan of um…
CORONA EDITOR (I refuse to call it Corona Composer GUI… come on Rob… Everyone, even every Corona person says it confuses itself with the Composer code that replaced Storyboard. Especially now that it is gone. (I dont know I checked a few builds ago and it was pulled, or the functionality of it was pulled. Like my stuff I made with it was huge, etc.)
You need an editor. A lot of people that love programming and geting nerdy with it will balk. They have balked. ‘I dont program that way’. ‘It causes people to avoid learning *proper* code’, ‘it causes questions of make my game buttons’, etc… but… not really. Not at all. It teaches code. trust me.
Longer term, I think we are waiting to see what the industry moves toward.
This kind of makes me super nervous. I think that Corona has had a problem in the past following current trends in gaming. It was me who begged and pleaded and finally got display.setDefault (“magTextureFilter”, “nearest”). I did that. I begged and emailed and Walter saw the light and the next day it was in a build. Without that all pixel games were blurry as hell. That was in mid 2013!
hmm… I think that one problem at Corona, while everyone there is very very good at what they do… seriously I love all of you…
There are not enough people there in games. Not enough people with game experience. No one there pushing for the tools that real game developers actually need. And yes, Corona was games primary.
But we don’t even have a basic grab and go multiplane side scroller as far as I know. Not even a sample that works with free Tiled. You look at Gamemaker and those types, thats what a lot of people want.
We really need an editor. That will spit basic sprite stuff into your code. Something that will build the modules even. I use to use SpriteLoq, which came really close to being a Corona thing, then it went over when the Ceo left to…thinking… of that… html… company that split and is now working out of an apartment or something… :/ Carlos’ company… But anyrate yeah.
I made my game QuestLord with no knowlege of what the actual module was doing. Well I knew it was loading up sprites and putting them in my game. I could call sprites from it. I can change their anims. pause them. etc. It rocked. I even looked at the modules and edited them a bit. It was great. That game has had 160,000 downloads.
Now on the sequel I have had to learn how to make those modules myself. They work, I hope I did them right. But requiring that for everyone who makes a sprite intensive game, holy ****. pardon my french. I mean… Its cool, but its too much. An editor should spit that out. and Corona should make that editor.
When the Gr2.0 thing came… The makers of SpriteLoq had already left. I’ve looked through the layout.lua files it made, I understand them somewhat, but not that well. It uses old Sprite, and uses the name sprite in the code… and that directly conflicts with gr.2. 
So I have to recode it. All of it. in a huge game, that already has 160k download customers and until then… I can’t update for iOS. :o
So yea, any Corona needs its OWN editor. It’s own thing that creates layout.lua files with sprite counts and animations. seriously. you can explain it. you can do it yourself. AND you can use the editor to spit that code out. That was the natural progression that should have taken place.
If Corona supports developers like me, with 28 years experience with games spanning from Atari ST, Arcade Coin Op, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Sega Dreamcast, PS1, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, PC and now Android/iOS/Kindle… phew… Then they will be able to provide the proper tools and sdk to game developers.
If they pretend that they know what they need to know… Argue me down at ever turn… then they will do a lot of waiting around to see how the market changes.
I do love Corona, long live Corona.
I think this is one of the best threads I’ve read on this forum in a loooooong time! Thanks everyone for the valuable input and insightful opinions! Thanks Rob also, for chiming in from the Corona side.
Too busy to answer today, but I’d like to chime in a bit regarding the absence of “readymade” game tools later on when I find the time.
Hmm. Can’t refrain myself from posting a bit already.
I must say I am also one of the people that was and is still a bit on edge about Corona’s business model now that it has become, mainly, free. How does CoronaLabs generate it’s income? And building on that: will I, one day, be forced to put ads in my game so Corona can share in the ad revenue, or share a bit of my (virtually non-existent) games and apps revenue. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.