Book Image

Corona SDK Mobile Game Development: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Corona SDK Mobile Game Development: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Corona SDK is the fastest and easiest way to create commercially successful cross platform mobile games. Just ask Robert Nay, a 14 year old who created Bubble Ball - downloaded three million times, famously knocking Angry Birds off the top spot. You don't need to be a programming veteran to create games using Corona. Corona SDK is the number one tool for creating fun, simple blockbuster games. Assuming no experience at all with programming or game development you will learn the basic foundations of Lua and Corona right through to creating several monetized games deployable to Android and Apple stores. You will begin with a crash course in Lua, the programming language underpinning the Corona SDK tool. After downloading and installing Corona and writing some simple code you will dive straight into game development. You will start by creating a simple breakout game with controls optimized for mobile. You will build on this by creating two more games incorporating different features such as falling physics. The book ends with a tutorial on social network integration, implementing in app purchase and most important of all monetizing and shipping your game to the Android and App stores.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Corona SDK Mobile Game Development Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Time for action – creating a Hello World application in two lines of code


Now that we have the simulator and text editors set up, let's start making our very first Corona program! The first program we will be making is called Hello World. It is a traditional program that many people learn when starting a new programming language.

  1. Open your preferred text editor and type the following lines:

    textObject = display.newText( "Hello World!", 50, 40, native.systemFont, 36 )
    textObject:setTextColor( 255,255,255)
  2. Next, create a folder on your desktop called Hello World. Save the preceding text as a file named main.lua to the location of your project folder.

  3. Launch Corona. You will be greeted with the Corona SDK screen. Click on Simulator and navigate to the Hello World folder you just created. You should see your main.lua file in this folder as shown in the following screenshot:

  4. On Mac, click on the Open button. On Windows, select the main.lua file and click the Open button. You'll see your new program running in the Corona Simulator: