Since I last updated a lot has happened with my iPhone game (called “LBDA”). I made quite a bit of progress on it, up to the point where it was in a playable state and included sound, multiple menu screens and four game modes. At that point I started creating the artwork and adding it into the game.

Then, earlier this week, GameSalad (my development tool) updated their software to version 0.9.1 and my game immediately broke. Well, maybe the game itself still works, but there’s no way to know since all of GS’s preview functions are fucked. I was pissed. Really pissed. What’s even worse is that GameSalad doesn’t even publicly acknowledge there’s a problem. Their go-to line is “well, this software is still in beta and you can use it for free,” which is true. But if they’re trying to build user loyalty they should at least admit they broke something and give a timeframe for a fix.

So, rather than just focus on my game’s artwork and wait for GS to release another update, I decided to switch development kits. This lead me to Corona.

Corona seems cool, powerful and well-supported. Plus, it’s also supposed to be fairly simple to pick up. Simple, that is, if you have some basic programming experience. Which I don’t. But I decided to learn this thing anyway, dammit. Which is where I am now.

I’m slowly (very slowly) teaching myself to use Corona and to code in the Lua programming language. This is not a particularly easy task for someone whose sole coding experience was learning basic HTML back in 1999. But I am making tiny bits of progress every night, despite having to constantly pound my head on my desk just to understand Lua. Right now I’ve got a menu screen with some graphics and clickable buttons that make sounds. Oh boy! At some point I’ll actually have to figure out how to recreate the game part of LBDA in code. Yikes.

It’s pretty disheartening having come so close to completing a game and then having to rebuild the whole thing in a completely foreign environment. But then I remind myself that less than a month ago I didn’t even know how to make anything in GameSalad, and I ended up getting pretty comfortable there. Corona is a harder thing to learn but I think it will ultimately make my game better. Plus, now I feel like I’m really “building” a video game from the ground up, rather than “making” one with a simple toy. I love the idea of GameSalad, but its execution is really lacking. Hopefully one day it will end up being really great. Until then I’ll be over here forcing code into my head.