Silvia Domenech - Create Mobile Games with Corona: Build with Lua on iOS and Android

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I would like to begin by thanking the artists who have made this books projects possible. Without them, the demos would be limited to stick figures created by an artistically challenged programmer. I am indebted to Daniel Cook from Lost Garden for his 2D tile set;

I must also thank the amazing community of developers who code using Corona, as well as all the beta readers who caught numerous bugs and made suggestions on the forums. This book also received lots of input from a great group of technical reviewers: in no particular order, they are Brent Sorrentino, Charley Stran, Javier Collado, Stephen Wolff, Al Scherer, Stephen Orr, and Brian Schau. Of course, this book is what it is thanks to my editors, Fahmida Y. Rashid and Aron Hsiao, both exceptional in different ways. Finally, thanks to the Pragmatic Programmers for their wonderful writing workflow and everything they do for the programming community...oh, and for letting me write this book!

Greetings and welcome to the world of mobile-game development! If youre reading this, then youre probably already aware of the Corona SDK and its usefulness for mobile app development and mobile games in particular. In this book, youll learn Corona by developing a series of mobile games, mastering most of Coronas capabilities in the process. Well start with a relatively simple game and some basic mechanics and then quickly move on to more complex games and techniques. By the time were done, youll be able to code interactive games with moving units and projectiles and even include advertisements.

The Corona SDK is a great tool for making 2D mobile games. Its cross-platform, its easy to learn, and it makes it really fast to code games. You can also forget about buying expensive programs and tools before you get started, because Corona lets you code and distribute your games for free. You need to buy it only if you want to add advanced features such as in-game ads or in-game purchases.

Many game-development environments make it difficult for us to create games for multiple platforms. Even if we can port to multiple platforms, some of those games may not be optimized. When making mobile games, its especially important to use as few resources as possible; we dont want users to see their battery life plummet the second they open our games. Corona lets us make games specifically targeted at mobile devices, both iOS and Android, so we wont be making lazy ports of PC games.

Coronas free starter edition is called Corona SDK Starter. Unlike many game engines starter editions, it comes with almost all the features currently available in the Pro version. You can install the program, learn how to use it, and distribute your games with the free version. You dont have to buy Corona until your games are really good and you want to add advertisements or offer in-app purchases.

You wont believe this until you get coding, but Corona makes coding much faster than if you decided to code directly in Objective-C or Java. Youll use Lua, and you can load and display an image with a single line of code. You can add physics to that image with another line. You can write great games using very little code.

Corona comes with a Physics application programming interface (API) built on top of Box2D, which means you wont have to code your own physics behaviors and collision-detection functions. Adding physics to your games will be easy and quick. Debugging will be easy, too.