Jayant,
Thanks for the great review! I thought i’d answer some of your questions from the review:
Re the wait between levels because of the speech bubble, I’ve already sped that up for version 1.1 which is now in review with apple 
Re: Layers. Yes you’re totally right, It uses one layer for each horizontal line of blocks. Inside each layer I keep track of where the blocks are so as to reduce the number of layers needed. I also keep logical track of the shadows and redraw them only when necessary. Most people don’t notice it has any shadows until I mention it, but without them you totally lose the 3D effect.
Re: Zoom and Pan. This was a headache to do. Its not hard in itself, but it really can get slow on slower devices (android). So I’m scaling the actual layer itself and storing how to get back to the original position. There’s a little calculation because it zooms to the board size which can change per level. The player also has to be moved into a layer or the X/Y rounding adds errors which add up. The stars and other ‘items’ are at the top of the layer above ‘tiles’ and there is another array keeping track of these. I don’t store Z position unless I have to.
RE: Maps and engine. I’m not using LIME at all. Its all coded directly in corona. I coded most of it then discovered Lime. But since Lime has performance issues on real hardware and I really wanted it to work fast on android, I decided to code it all from scratch. I created a Level designer on PC which I used to create the levels by hand. I considered auto generating levels but, as you’re a puzzle lover like me, you’ll know hand tested levels are the best! The levels alone took a week!
Re: Transitions. The entire game uses transition.to. I don’t touch enterFrame because I want it to be super fast no matter how big the map gets in the future. I also didn’t use Director Class because I wanted to be 100% sure there’s no memory leaks. I considered using sprite animation, but decided its better to keep it simple and this kind of game really doesn’t need it.
Re: my first app… Its my first app on corona, and my first ever game. But I did study software engineering at university and do a lot of embedded programming. As you’ll know tho a game is totally different thinking to an application, so I had to try lots of things to find the best solution.
Overall it was a really fun experience, and totally different to any of the [boring] programming I do normally. I hope everyone likes it and maybe i’ll make a version 2. I already have many more ideas to keep it interested
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