Corona is certainly an exciting platform for game development. Just 5 months ago the number of tutorials available were counted in tens at most. But today there’s an increasing number of them and so, before it becomes overwhelming i’d like to compile a list of the Corona tutorials that have helped me the most to understand the power of the engine.

Before we start i’d like to exclude the included examples. They are awesome if you wish to learn how to use a specific feature. Keep that in mind.

1.– Make  a Game in 8 minutes

Even though the title is kind of a lie because only the first part is 8 minutes long and the rest in the series varies, this series is the perfect entry point into Corona Development. Going through these series you’ll quickly master the art of creating objects, dealing with physics and even create a simple game, which may not seem like much to you, but a variant of it(Float)  has managed to sell a lot, and i mean a lot.

2.–Rafael Hernandez’s Screencasts

Rafael Hernadez’s screencasts are something you have to do early on to get the best out of them. If you wait too long, you’ll probably be wishing he goes much faster with some of the basics so go ahead and take them right after you go through the above tutorials.

3.–Understanding Lua tables in Corona SDK

If you’re just getting started with Lua and Corona you may not know yet that one of the fundamental aspects of the language are indeed the tables. You are guaranteed to use them at one point or another. So please, understand them before you start on any project because failure to do so might lead you on several paths of unnecessary burden.

The tutorial linked in the title is one of the most comprehensive ones on tables that you will find on the net. So take your time and read it entirely. And you may want to look further on this topic.

This concludes our list of the essential Corona tutorials. IF you really like tutorials you can go down into http://learningcorona.com which is a complete resource of all the tutorials on Corona up to date but a word of advice. Once you go through the basics, start a project, even a simple one and put all you learned into practice and that which you don’t know may be found in the API reference.

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