Might as well mention that we are not affiliated with Corona/Ansca in any way, but we will talk about it a lot here, because it is the engine we chose for our game. The reasons are explained briefly in this post.

Skip this paragraph if you already know why mobile game development is a great choice for starting indie developers looking to turn a profit. I might as well say the obvious. Mobile games are a platform that requires less investment than most others. That is probably the most important reason. And when i say investment i’m referring not only to money, but also to experience, time, and man power. There is also the fact that many indie devs have found gold mines in this arena and in comparison it appears to happen much more often here than in PC games, XBLA or browser games which may be the other areas where indies can enter easily.

Why did we choose Corona might just be a slightly more interesting question since there’s plenty of engines for multiplatform mobile game development and there also the choice to not use one at all. We researched the following engines before settling on Corona. Disclaimer: This is mostly how we felt, and maybe we didn’t dedicate enough time to each platform, so.. there.

Native: Objective-C + Xcode: We certainly tried looking at this platform since it obviously may have the advantages of not dealing with SDK limitations and taking full advantage of every up to date iOS SDK implementations instead of having to wait for the Engine to implement it. But we found it too complex for the project we wanted to do. And felt like the learning curve was too high too. Then again the rise of Android has given great strength to an engine that supports it without having to rewrite your code.

Cocos2d: Cocos2d seemed like a great idea, but the community we researched always seemed to place Corona above it. Our own research was that we couldn’t find much of a community and felt like even though plenty of hooks were placed to make thing easier, you still had to learn all the tools of the trade of iOS development to start messing with Cocos2d. Even books mention that in their introductions.

Game Salad: We quickly discarded this one because of its “No code” philosophy. All of us are from a technical backgrund and we didn’t feel the need to evade code. I could hardly mention anything about this platform.

Unity for iOS: Is your game 2D? Go Corona!. Is your game 3D? Go Unity!. That’s what the blogs and people are saying. We knew our first few games would be 2d so this was a strong reason but not the only one. Licensing costs for Unity are not high. They are… mid range. Our group however is low range. And we didn’t feel like taking a limited iOS License instead of an iOS Pro which is worth $1000.

So therefore. We chose Corona. One of the things i really liked about Corona, personally, was that i managed to do massively more in Corona than in any of the other platforms in the same time. Also the LUA programming language felt much more natural than the Objective C platforms we looked at. Corona also supports Android which is booming right now even though its app sales are still way behind iOS’s.

We are 2 months into development now with Corona and we feel like it was the right choice, even if we sometimes have to put up with certain limitations, which we will adress later, i’m pretty sure we would go the same way again.

So there you go. Hope this helps out people choosing to get into Mobile Game Development. This may be the last post that dwells too much on story

We were cruising trough the half stages of college when we first thought as a group that we wanted to start our own business. Plenty of teachers had suggested it in different ways so the idea was kind of growing on us, but the idea of joining this group of friends with this objective only become clear then. The difference was from starting 5 separate businesses to starting one stronger team of 5.

Back then we all wanted to be game programmers, but the entry points of the industry seemed too high to get without good experience or plenty of investment. So we went trough several business ideas mainly dealing with web services. This wasn’t too bad, but one of the core teachings of entrepreneurship is to create a business that you would enjoy doing day in and day out.

Plenty of business plan’s later we reached the end of college and since we hadn’t built a sustainable plan yet, we went separate even tough we continued to see each other. After trying several jobs, in different industries we started to feel like we wanted something different. We wanted to be game developers.

And so the idea was passes along to everyone in the group and we decided it was worth the shot.

This blog is going to talk about this. 4 guys sitting in front of each other trying to create video games.