Pointers on starting out.

Getting Started Newbie Questions
#1

Hello!

I’m new to the Corona SDK community and game development in general, however I am not new to lua and can freely develop with it.

I used to write scripts/code in Garry’s Mod which for those who don’t know, besides a silly game is sort of a lua framework for the Source engine, allowing you to either add a funny model to the game or completely change the game.

Garry’s mod had hooks and base functions which made things simpler, for instance LocalPlayer which returned the current player client-side.

I came here for help because I never developed a game from scratch and I am not sure of the workflow(?) and where to start.

I used to first make all the first entering the game logic like main menu, then handle spawning, then handle movement and UIs and after that I focused on other stuff.

Problem is what worked for me in Garrys Mod seems to be frowned up in the game dev world, I got told by some guys that I should first make the movement and world and only then worry about menus and other stuff.

I came from love2d and tried to make a simple click to move in a tiled map, but the code got messy fast and after getting a player drawn in together with walking up/down/left/right animations and having trouble with tiled map loader I decided to come asking for help.

I don’t really see much difference between Corona SDK and Love2D and I’m sorry if I am mistaken but so far I decided I rather go with Corona SDK for my first game.

Thank you for reading!

#2

Hi @epic2 and welcome to the Corona Labs forums.

You have several questions here and hopefully other’s will reply too so you can get their opinion on stuff.

With regards to “do you build the UI first or do you build the game play first?” Do what works for you. In the end you have to do both. But let me explain why you should do the game play first. The reason for that is your idea may simply not work. You may have an idea that works great if you have a keyboard with arrow keys or a controller but doesn’t work with touch. Let me give you a real example. Back in the early 80’s I built a game called T-62 Tank Commander. it played well on a computer where you had to type in commands like “move 12, 2”, “attack 10,4” and the move calculated and a new map drawn.  I tried to implement that on an iPhone and you finished the whole game in under 5 minutes. I quickly abandoned the game as an mobile game because no one would pay for a game you finished in 5 minutes.  This is a term called “rapid prototyping” where you can test your game concept, frequently without art, justing using circles and rectangles. Corona is great for that because we have an instant-update simulator. As soon as you save your changes, the simulator updates and  you can see your results. You don’t have to waste time compiling, installing in on a device to test or trying to get the Xcode simulator to load your app. 

I believe Love2D requires you to build from the command line and I don’t think they have an instant update simulator.  Corona has been around a lot longer and we have a very rich set of API calls to help you build great games.

A great starting point is our Getting Started Guide https://docs.coronalabs.com/guide/programming/index.html

After going through that, many of your questions should be answered.

Thanks for looking at Corona!

#3

Hi @epic2 and welcome to the Corona Labs forums.

You have several questions here and hopefully other’s will reply too so you can get their opinion on stuff.

With regards to “do you build the UI first or do you build the game play first?” Do what works for you. In the end you have to do both. But let me explain why you should do the game play first. The reason for that is your idea may simply not work. You may have an idea that works great if you have a keyboard with arrow keys or a controller but doesn’t work with touch. Let me give you a real example. Back in the early 80’s I built a game called T-62 Tank Commander. it played well on a computer where you had to type in commands like “move 12, 2”, “attack 10,4” and the move calculated and a new map drawn.  I tried to implement that on an iPhone and you finished the whole game in under 5 minutes. I quickly abandoned the game as an mobile game because no one would pay for a game you finished in 5 minutes.  This is a term called “rapid prototyping” where you can test your game concept, frequently without art, justing using circles and rectangles. Corona is great for that because we have an instant-update simulator. As soon as you save your changes, the simulator updates and  you can see your results. You don’t have to waste time compiling, installing in on a device to test or trying to get the Xcode simulator to load your app. 

I believe Love2D requires you to build from the command line and I don’t think they have an instant update simulator.  Corona has been around a lot longer and we have a very rich set of API calls to help you build great games.

A great starting point is our Getting Started Guide https://docs.coronalabs.com/guide/programming/index.html

After going through that, many of your questions should be answered.

Thanks for looking at Corona!