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

Optimizing your workflow


So far, we have touched on the vital basics of programming in Lua and terminology used in Corona SDK. Once you start developing interactive applications to sell in the App Store or Google Play Store, you need to be aware of your design choices and how they affect the performance of your application. This means taking into consideration how much memory your mobile device is using to process the application. Here are some things to look for if you're just starting out on Corona SDK.

Using memory efficiently

In some of our earlier examples, we used global variables in our code. Cases like those are an exception since the examples did not contain a high volume of functions, loops to call out to or display objects. Once you start building a game that is heavily involved with function calls and numerous display objects, local variables will increase performance within your application and will be placed on the stack so Lua can interface with them faster.

The following code...