Opinion about Corona SDK from native iOS developer or Unity

[J. A. Whye]

Granted, there are probably many game apps (educational/learning) I could build that would still be perfectly fine in Corona (which I will probably be asked to do if the business app works out solid), but for a 'real' game, i'd personally be extremely leery to do Corona.

Looking at the Top Grossing games in the App Store I think at least 70% of the top 50 games there could have been done with Corona SDK. 3D stuff, hard-core racing games, stuff like that are not a good fit for Corona, but most casual games, adventure games, board/card games, etc., are.

Yes, there are "dead-ends" that can bite you if you don't know about them going in (such as, if you *must* use iAds, forget Corona) but as long as you're aware of the limitations (not as many as some make it out to be) you can go a long way with Corona. For both games and biz-type apps.

Jay

PS - I sell tutorials and tools for Corona SDK developers, but if I didn't think it was "the best" thing overall I'd switch to something else. I play with everything -- and keep coming back to Corona.

[bladko]

great folks thanks for feedback ! anyone else "native" ?

[CoronaGeek]

As of December 21st, iAds support has been added in Corona SDK Build 992 along with a bunch of other features.

[bladko]

yes iAd, native twitter, android iAP. still waiting for corona cloud and admob thou

[binaryhelix]

Unity is hard to beat for 3D especially with their built-in asset store. It can do 2D with a little effort.

Corona is excellent for 2D. It's basically Lua + Box2d. Probably the easiest of the bunch to make a game. I hate their yearly subscription model though. If they go out of business or you don't renew, you can't update your app since the app submission process requires contacting their server. Gideros is another good alternative especially since they have a free "community" version that you can use to submit to the app store, and they have their own IDE. Moai is another possibility though it feels lower level, but a big plus is that it's open source, free, and Double Fine are making Middle Manager of Justice with it.

So if you're considering 2D (Lua + Box2d) on iOS and Android, look into these products:

Corona (http://coronalabs.com)
Gideros (http://giderosmobile.com)
Moai (http://getmoai.com)

Moai can also do Mac/PC.

And then there's Love which is only for Mac/PC/Linux: http://love2d.org