A High Schooler’s Successful Mobile App Studio

A high schooler talks about runnin’ a mobile app studio and his first mobile game, Fuzz Blast…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/fuzzblast-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]Onzm8vOGVYM[/wp_youtube]

Free Friday: Corona Cross-Promo Tool (Beta)

Hey folks,

Here’s the code I mentioned last week…a little belated…but we would be releasing some code for Corona developers…here for indie devs to help cross-promote their Corona games with other developers.

It’s in beta form…
you can download it here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/promotool.zip

You can also sign up for the service here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/crosspromo/creditsystem.php

You’ll get a “promo id” via e-mail…put that in your promo .lua file…so all downloads through your game give you credits…and then your game gets promoted in other people’s apps 🙂

Feel free to add feedback + comments 🙂

Free Friday: Corona Game Jam — Win a Free Corona License

Hey folks,

For those of you into Corona and its ability to rapidly create mobile games…we’re going to have Corona game jam this weekend and will give away a free PRO subscription to Corona to the winner as well as an indie subscriptions to the 2nd and 3rd place winners.

Here are the details. You have this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to make a game in Corona. You must submit by 8 pm on Sunday, PST. Games are submitted and the winner will be chosen by Monday at 8 PM.

The goal is to make a fun mobile game. We’ll also be releasing some free code during the weekend to help you reach that goal 🙂

In any case, you can download the Corona SDK here…
http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/

Enjoy 🙂

Co-Founder of Corona Talks About Rapid Mobile Development

Carlos, co-founder of Ansca Mobile, talks about the benefits of Corona and mobile game development…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/corona-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]qEMGcy-mizM[/wp_youtube]

Float — The Story Behind 1 Million Installs on the iPhone

Brock, founder of Crawl Space Games, talks about developing iPhone games…including Float, the game that got over 1 million installs…

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/float-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]QxnH3aWf38A[/wp_youtube]

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This Week is Corona Week on the Podcast Show ….

Hey folks,

As you may have noticed, there have been more mobile game dev interviews in the past few weeks and months. This is partially due to the interest by smaller game developers to make games/apps for their iPhone and Android devices.

As I’ve been interviewing indie mobile game developers, I’ve noticed that some indies are beginning to use the Corona SDK by Ansca Mobile

Of course, there was the 14 year old that used the Corona SDK to make the #1 free iPhone game…and the artist that used Corona to make his first iPhone game. This week, we’ll also have an interview with the developers of Float…the team that used Corona SDK to develop their game and get over 1 million installs.

Additionally, we’ll have an interview with the CEO of Corona about the future features on Corona.

Corona allows small developers to use the Lua programming language to make iPhone and Android games. Granted, the Android version still needs some additional features to make it feature complete, I’ve seen developers successfully deploy games to both iPhone and Android using Corona.

Enjoy and feel free to post questions/suggestions you have related to Corona 🙂

How a Hobbyist iPhone Developer Became A Full-Time Indie, Part 2

Joe talks about the journey from hobbyist iPhone developer to Full-Time iPhone Indie Developer

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/fire-maple-games-part-2.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]xiOGusCwi8M[/wp_youtube]

How a Hobbyist iPhone Developer Became A Full-Time Indie, Part I

Joe talks about the journey from hobbyist iPhone developer to Full-Time iPhone Indie Developer

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/fire-maple-games-part-1.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]QjmKyfz35Eg[/wp_youtube]

Using Corona To Make an Android Mobile App in 15 Minutes…

Hey folks,

We’re going to do some app tutorials to help encourage more app experiments within the community…

The first tutorial is doing a simple monkey tricks app. The goal here is to make a simple app that has a monkey that does tricks when you tap it on your phone 🙂

Let’s get started…first we’re going to use Corona…it’s a cross-platform mobile tool that allows for development for both Android and iPhone. It uses Lua as the primary language.

You can download it here…
http://anscamobile.com/corona

First we need a monkey…let’s add that first 🙂

Now we also need a background…a place for the monkey to have fun 🙂

Let’s do that next…
The cool thing about Corona is that there are already pre-made modules to help make simple apps. One of them is the “Director” class…you can download it here…
http://developer.anscamobile.com/code/director-class-10

The director class abstracts things so that each “screen” in the app is a new file. Very simple and an easy way to conceptualizing things.

In our case, we’ll only have one screen…and that will be the Monkey doing tricks against the background.

Corona has some transition effects we can use to easily rotate and move items. They are like a Tweening class.

You can read more about the transitions here…
http://developer.anscamobile.com/reference/index/transitionto

Now, let’s initialize the code in screen1.lua that allows us to add things…here’s a cutout of the code…
the “–” denotes comments in Lua 🙂

local localGroup = display.newGroup()

— Background…this is the background from above
— Corona allows us to do this easily with display.newImage
local background = display.newImage(“zoobg.png”, 0, 0, true)
localGroup:insert(background)

— Title for the screen, for now, we’ll keep things empty
local title = display.newText(“”, 0, 0, native.systemFontBold, 24)
title:setTextColor( 0,0,255)
title.x = 160
title.y = 20
localGroup:insert(title)

— Here is the main part…we create a monkey image
monkeyBtn = display.newImage(“pet-monkey.png”)
— We create a function that will do a monkey trick when the player touches the monkey
local function monkeyBtnt ( event )
if event.phase == “ended” then
— Get a random number
local moveID = math.random(0, 3)
— We do a monkey trick based on the random number
if(moveID == 0) then
transition.to(event.target, {time=250, x = math.random(0, 310), y=math.random(0, 440), rotation=360 })

elseif(moveID == 1) then
transition.to(event.target, {time=150, x = math.random(0, 310), rotation=180 })

elseif(moveID == 2) then

transition.to(event.target, {time=250, x = math.random(0, 310), y=math.random(0, 440), rotation=360 })

elseif(moveID == 3) then
transition.to(event.target, {time=250, x = math.random(0, 310), y=math.random(0, 440), rotation=360 })

end

end
end
— Now we say that when someone touches the monkey, we call the monkeBtnt function made above
monkeyBtn:addEventListener(“touch”, monkeyBtnt)
monkeyBtn.x = 100
monkeyBtn.y = 320
monkeyBtn.isVisible = true
localGroup:insert(monkeyBtn)

— We’ll also add a close button that allows the player to close the app
local exitScene = 0
local closeBtn = display.newImage(“close.png”)
local function closeBtnt ( event )
if event.phase == “ended” then
if(exitScene == 0) then
exitScene = 1
os.exit()
end
end
end
— We have a “touch” event listener that gets called when someone taps the close button
closeBtn:addEventListener(“touch”,closeBtnt)
closeBtn.x = 300
closeBtn.y = 20
closeBtn.isVisible = true
localGroup:insert(closeBtn)

— Runtime:addEventListener(“enterFrame”, showTimer)

— MUST return a display.newGroup()
return localGroup

That’s it! We’re done…very simple. Once again, this is because of Corona and the director class that allows us to abstract things.

Now that we’re done, we can generate the .apk easily and put it on Android.

It’s now on the Android market…it got a one-star rating…because someone felt it was too simple. But still…not bad for 15 minutes of work.

Here’s a screenshot…

You can download the source and code here…
pet-monkey
Enjoy 🙂

How a Non-Developer Used Corona to Make an iPhone Game

Ignacio talks about using Corona to develop iPhone games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/frescolina-games-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]YO8lNyoI9Yk[/wp_youtube]