I'm a C# / Sharepoint developer (see http:// squarepoint.blogspot.com) by trade, so a new language (LUA) was not of interest to me. However, game development has been a passing interest for many many years, so it was worth a look.
The first thing that was interesting was that there wasn't a lot to learn about LUA, which helped - it uses simple variables and tables to do most of it's work. Coupled with an OpenGL 2D/3D library, it was pretty quick and easy to get a simple concept up and running. In my case, that concept was implementing an multi-character A* shooting game. It looked sloppy, but was fast to put together.
About a month later and a few late nights, I was noticing that there's a lot more under the hood that could be accomplished. The TwoLivesLeft Codea forums are one of the most active and participatory ones I've been on (for example I also will blog about MOAI; that forum is like a sinking tomb) with people who are genuinely interested in helping others get their concepts from head to device.
One of the most challenging issues with Codea is archival of code; there's not real way to do it in the application (as of 1.4.6, version 1.5 is supposed to resolve that). I've many projects with code that works but I couldn't recall how to write it from scratch; there's other template projects that are useful for certain things like game frameworks, etc. Losing that code would be a disaster. Coupled with my desire to stay fully iPad, it's a concern. There are workarounds to this issue, but it's still a challenge.
Additionally, accessing things like textboxes and sliders can't be done (yet); it's a blank canvas and doesn't really access the default IOS UI. This tends to be unimportant until it is. Once again, the community has put together some basic solutions to resolve that issue.
With those issues mentioned, there were too many positives from a game developers POC mindset to pass up:
- Update: Shaders added in 1.5!
So, several months and a few too many late nights, I'm still coding away occasionally on a few projects and I plan on releasing a few of them into the App Store in the next few months.
I'd encourage anyone who wants to dabble in game development or 3D to get a copy and play around. There's lots of support out there to help make your ideas reality!
