I actually wish that Corona Labs would continue to grow. I love Corona SDK.
My main concern is Corona’s focus on mobile platforms (iOS, Android) as those haven’t been a viable route for most game developers for quite some time.
Having desktop Windows & Mac OS support is great but I hope to see Corona exporting to consoles (Xbox, Playstation) as well. For example, the Xbox Creators Program looks like a good opportunity even for not-so-experienced devs to reach a wider audience.
@gsimeonov I guess it’s a matter of perspective. Many people see Mobile as the most profitable segment now and in the future. According to this article from PocketGamer: http://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/66041/newzoo-global-mobile-market-2017/
For the near future our roadmap is about getting HTML5 builds a reality. After that, we will look at other platforms. There are requests for Linux (though primarily as a developer platform), Xbox, Nintendo Switch and others that we need to consider. There are a total of four votes for building for the Playstation at our feature request site: http://feedback.coronalabs.com
Rob
+1 for Nintendo Switch. As it is a handheld touch device it should work well with the existing Corona event system?
+1’s here don’t count. We need votes cast at http://feedback.coronalabs.com
FWIW:
Nintendo Switch currently has 76 votes
Xbox/UWP builds current has 114 votes.
Neither of those are signifying a strong need for those platforms given the effort involved to create and support new platforms. I never like to say X number of votes is needed because each task has to be compared to many different factors: How difficult, how much time it will take, cost-benefit analysis, community desires (i.e. votes).
Rob
I agree those numbers are low for such a major change to the SDK.
Still is this one going to happen (barely any code changes required from your side)?
I’ll bring it up with the team. I don’t know what the requirements are. One of my concerns is that the level of hardware in Chromebooks range drastically. I know I’ve see some with sub-standard GPUs.
Rob
My 3 votes for both Chromebooks and, especially, Nintendo Switch support.
@dodi_games, can’t say for sure but it seems that Appodeal will try to grow the platform especially on the mobile side. If you are after a mobile business yourself, I guess you are good to go. Maybe you should check out the roadmap they shared and decide accordingly.
I have been developing cross platform applications (that’s what we called them in the old days) for over 40 years. The key to a successful, small-team development company are its tools. We layered our applications then, which enabled us to have a core set of application code linking to OS specific DLLs giving us essentially a single set of source code. I spent a long time looking for a platform that would give me that capability between iOS, Android,v and at the time I thought, Windows. Believe me when I say that there are ALOT of bad “solutions” out there. I originally took a quick look at Corona and passed on it because it was a game platform and we do Business/Commercial products. I took another look after finding that there really wasn’t a platform that did everything I was looking for, and other than a few things ( read: newTextField) that have gotten better over time, it had the stability that we needed. Most importantly, Corona had @Rob and @Brent who answered every question no matter how ridiculous its seemed at the time. They never sugar coated it when there was something beyond the capabilities of the SDK. As such a major component of a product we are shortly releasing went Native, rather than trying to force through something Corona really couldn’t do. This product processes an enormous amount of data between multiple devices through a back-end server and realtime notifications. Corona handles the throughput efficiently, with no perceptible differences to the native code. And to me, THAT is impressive. If you are still having concerns regarding the platform, feel free to email or message me privately. Dave Anderson Masterbolt Development, Inc
dude… paragraphs are a thing! 
and really 40 years? a PC wasn’t even a thing then
I’m 61 and remember the first pc, wondering what the hell you could do in 64k. My first commercial mini product was a screen management library and disk manager for a wang 2200. (It did direct sector addressing, then) And yes, before that I kept my beer cold in the CPU cabinet and under the raised floor. Ok, if we are counting, I also was around before IBM put a ink ribbon on the punch cards, and have instructed my kids that when I go, to bury me face down, 9 edge first. (Google it). . Sorry about the paragraph.
I used to program (started with) zx spectrum and only had 48K (less rom used by OS)… I am constantly amazed by the 1k challenges and what can be achieved in assembler!
So true. And you realize that 99% of the folk here have no idea what we are talking about. Does this make us ancients or artifacts?
it makes us wise!
Ohh… I used to program zx spectrum when I was a kid, too!
Great to read that. We’re not alone in this world, hehe
Actually, the 48k Spectrum had 64k memory, 16k of that was taken with the OS which left 48k usable, while the "budget’ 16k model had 32k of which 16k was available. I remember loads of my mates bought 16k versions and then upgraded to 48k with a RAM pack. Of course you had to be really careful with them as they were susceptible to the famous “RAM pack wobble” which could kill your machine.
*sighs*
Ahh those were the days :)
I think anyone who uses Corona for any length of time realises how powerful it is for hassle free cross-platform development. The problem is, that’s a pretty small club and if it doesn’t get larger fairly soon, I fear for the future.
I listen to every developer podcast I can lay my hands on, with episodes going back as far as 2012. I’ve heard Corona mentioned maybe 3-4 times, and always as an afterthought. I personally think they need a re-branding, not only is Corona really the name of a beer, it doesn’t seem to be viewed as a serious development platform. And a lot of people I meet at conferences haven’t even heard of it in the first place…
@nick_sherman, definitely. Whenever I mention Corona to some people in game dev community they are all like “what is that? that must be new” but most of them know Defold already. I know the popularity comes with King at this point but Corona had a head start of years and it’s sad to say, they failed at marketing the product. Hope Appodeal has better plans to grow user base.
I’m speaking from the position of someone who is looking at the current offerings on the market. If I hadn’t already spent some time with Corona, it would be somewhere at the bottom of my list. For obvious reasons:
- the least number of supported platforms
- no visual editor
- apparent focus on “mobile”, which is kind of a dirty word for quite a bunch of people having a general interest in (making or playing) games
- relatively unimpressive showcase gallery
- the business model is based on creating a platform for advertisement, and not premium games.
This said, I’ve actually tried it and at least for now I just love the workflow, the API, and the awesome documentation.
Still unsure if Corona is an optimal choice for creating desktop games - mainly because those don’t seem to fit into the business model of the company.