Heads up:  this month, we’re formally launching Corona Game Edition and a new version of the Corona SDK.

Due to the overwhelming amount of great new features that both releases will include, we will be raising the price to $249/year for the regular Corona SDK and higher for the more heavy-duty Game Edition.

However, you can still grab a copy of both for only $99/year by signing up right now for a year’s subscription.  For the regular SDK, you’ll be upgraded for free when it ships next week; for Game Edition, you can download the current beta release (which is still covered in your $99/year) and can upgrade for free to the final release when it launches later this month.

Just thought you’d like to know!

We know we have at least one guitar player using Corona, so we thought this would be some great news to announce!

Heavy metal guitar powerhouse ESP Guitars just released their app, The ESP Experience, for iPhone.  The Corona-made app features regularly updated free song downloads, a nationwide ESP dealer locator, and even a video guitar lesson from Gus G. (Ozzy Osbourne’s new guitarist)  It also includes a built-in chromatic tuner, perfect for guitarists and bassists who don’t want to carry around a stand-alone tuner with their gear!

ESP’s artist roster includes James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett of Metallica, Tom Araya of Slayer, and Max Cavalera of Sepultura/Soulfly — and the Ansca Mobile team is honored to have been chosen to help contribute to that legacy!  Also, special thanks to Brainmask, who designed and built the app using Corona.

You can download The ESP Experience over at the App Store right now.
More details on the app can be found on the ESP blog.

Over the weekend, Beebe Games’ Doodle Dash! game broke into the App Store’s list of top free apps, coming in at #25! This comes just on the heels of it being OpenFeint’s Free Game of the Day honor last Thursday, which brought in over 40,000 downloads for the game.

Creator Jonathan Beebe must now be even more thrilled than he was when we interviewed him last week. We would like to extend our congrats and thanks to him for using Corona to build his successful game!

You can grab Doodle Dash! over at the App Store right now.

Jonathan Beebe recently made a splash with Doodle Dash! for iPhone, his first foray with Corona that just received the honor of being OpenFeint’s Free Game of the Day.

Below,  Jon details the process of choosing an SDK, creating Doodle Dash! (twice!) and why he hasn’t yet gotten around to buying a book on Objective-C.

To kick things off, can you give a background of your experience in game development? What types of platforms and languages can you work with, and which one(s) are your preferred ones to work with?

I’ve been “experimenting” with game development for a couple of years now. I have been a self-taught PHP web developer since 2006 (my preferred language, that is, until I discovered Lua through the Corona SDK) and I tried my hand at indie game development about a year and a half ago. I managed to get almost all the way through creating a logic/puzzle game for Windows using a piece of software titled “GameMaker.” (which, despite its name, is actually a mature and professional piece of software)

Unfortunately, due to time constraints and my personal situation at the time, I never got quite 100% through with the game. Besides, what I really wanted was a way to put my game creation on my new iPhone that I had just purchased, so there was a little inner conflict there when it came to developing desktop software/games anyway — my heart just wasn’t 100% into it.

So, was that when you decided to get into iPhone development?

Well, I wanted to get into it, but I had no experience with Objective-C. And, with a baby on the way at the time, I didn’t have enough cushion to invest my time/money into learning a language, development environment and marketplace that I really knew nothing about. So, I didn’t think too much about iPhone programming at that time. On top of that, I didn’t own a Mac, so it really was out of the question.

That sounds pretty bleak — so, what ultimately turned you around?

Fast-forward to just a couple months ago: my wife purchased an iPod Touch. So, naturally I started using my iPhone more, which had pretty much become nothing more than “just another phone” to me until then.

What inspired her to get an iPod Touch in the first place was that quite a few of our friends and family were posting their scores from their iPhone/Touch games to their Facebook, and we wanted to get in on the “action.” Once we both got our devices, we downloaded the games our friends and family were playing. Before we knew it, we were having a lot of fun competing with them on Facebook/OpenFeint, trying to get the highest score and what-not. Another cool thing is that many of them were friends and family we hadn’t really spoken with in a while, so it became a great way to keep in touch.

Naturally, my wife and I both thought it would be really cool to make our own iPhone games to share with our friends, family, and the world — and possibly make a profit as well. Since we both play games, and have lots of experience in graphics design as well as programming, we knew we’d make the perfect game development team without the need to ever outsource any of the work to outsiders. And the fact that I had just purchased a MacBook in January just made the whole thing just seem like fate. So at that point, Beebe Games was born.

Yes! From there, what were your first steps as official iPhone game-makers?

I thought for sure I was going to have to buckle-down, buy a book, and learn Objective-C. But knowing how tall of a mountain that would be to climb, I started searching for alternatives “just in case.” My initial search took me to a piece of software called GameSalad.

GameSalad is a drag-and-drop (no coding) iPhone game development program that allows someone with little-to-no programming experience to create an iPhone/iPod Touch game (little did I know, it’s really only viable for very simple games).

So I downloaded GameSalad and actually produced two games with it that went “Ready for Sale” in the Apple App Store. One of them was the first version of Doodle Dash! and the other was a game that I’ve since removed from sale. While I was initially excited about having published games for sale, there were some things about my games that I was very unhappy with.

Like what?

First was performance: GameSalad games tend to run slow/choppy, and mine was no exception. I did manage to make the game playable after doing countless performance tweaks, but the end-product definitely wasn’t at the level I wanted it to be (not even close).

Then, there was the lack of social features and web connectivity. The social nature of iPhone games (posting scores to Facebook/OpenFeint, etc) is what drew me into iPhone gaming in the first place, so it — for lack of a better word — sucked that the games we were producing couldn’t do that, not even in the simplest way. You could see your own high score in the game, that’s about as far as GameSalad would allow you to go with that.

Also, there was the issue GameSalad splash screen. Unless I paid $2,000 to have it removed (out of the question), the games we made featured a big “Made with GameSalad” splash screen that showed up for anywhere from 3-5 seconds when you first opened the app. So, not only were there performance issues (not just in-game performance, but loading times were extremely high as well), and an absence of even basic social/web features, but there was also this big fat “Made with GameSalad” that came up every time someone played the game which, in my opinion, severely wore on the credibility of the new Beebe Games brand that we were trying hard to build.

Sounds like you were pretty much finished right as you were getting started!

I was! So, from there, I decided it was time to remake the games in Objective-C, even if it did take me a while to learn it.

Everything I’ve taught myself online — including HTML, PHP, Visual Basic, some C++, and the GameMaker program I used about a year and a half ago — was through online tutorials. So, naturally, that’s the first place I looked to start learning Objective-C. Sadly, I soon realized that there are not very many (if any!) good Objective-C tutorials with the beginner in mind!

In fact, Objective-C looked very overwhelming, but I had vowed not to give up. So, my next step was to go buy a book on the subject, but I didn’t do it right away. Instead, I had planned on doing that sometime later on in the week (thankfully!).

During my wait, on my quest to get my head wrapped around what it would entail to learn Objective-C game programming, I stumbled across your website and found the Corona SDK. I saw the examples in the Game Edition video, which already proved to be much better than anything GameSalad could produce, so I knew it would be sufficient for the games that my wife and I wanted to develop.

So that‘s how Corona came into the picture! But what made you decisively want to stick with it?

What really did it for me was seeing examples of Lua code (the language you use to program iPhone apps and games in Corona). Lua looked like a cross between PHP and Visual Basic to me, both of which were languages I was already very familiar with! I knew I could learn Lua very quickly, so I made a deal with myself (and my wife, of course) that I would download the Corona SDK 30-day trial and, if I could learn Lua/Corona and convert Doodle Dash! (or a significant portion of it) before the trial is up, then I’ll purchase a Corona license and go full-force with it.

I think the trial was at 22 days left when I had almost the entire Doodle Dash! game converted, plus a bunch of other great features that wasn’t present in the original GameSalad version (Facebook posting, OpenFeint leaderboards, amazing performance and tilt controls, new enemy sprites, etc.) so I purchased a Corona license, submitted the new update to my game, and it was approved within a few days!

You probably already guessed it, but I never got around to buying that Objective-C book!

You decided to completely remake a preexisting game with Corona — some might call this crazy because of the assumed long hours and redundant work that goes into rebuilding a game. Was that the case here, especially since you were just learning Corona and Lua?

I still have the development build of the old GameSalad-made Doodle Dash! on my iPhone and I sometimes go back and look at it to appreciate the new version I made with Corona. I think it would have been crazy  for me to have not remade it. I don’t want to chalk any of our games up, even if they are our earliest releases, as just “experience” so I wanted Doodle Dash! to be something that would be both fun and competitive — thankfully, Corona allowed me to do just that!

Since I was also learning Lua when I remade the game with Corona, I don’t think any of the work was “redundant”, but rather necessary because while I was learning Lua and Corona, my game was being re-made at the same time. (as opposed to learning by making small examples, and then remaking the game later on — which is normally the way it goes).

Exactly how much quicker (development time-wise) and shorter (lines of code) did the Corona build of Doodle Dash! turn out to be?

Doodle Dash! took me about 8 days to develop using Corona, and that was with learning Lua at the same time — which is the fastest I’ve ever picked up a language and developed a game at the same time! I attribute it 100% to the simplicity of Lua and how well Corona uses it to build your app (as well as all the help I received from the Corona forums). However, I believe development time for Doodle Dash! would have been even shorter if it wasn’t for my initial lack of knowledge in Lua.

The original GameSalad version of the game — which has only about half of the features of the Corona-made version — took about 2 weeks, which is also very fast by normal development standards. GameSalad has no coding involved, so I can’t compare lines of code, but it’s amazing how I was able to develop my game in Corona even faster than the GameSalad version, despite the fact that I did have to write code.

Doodle Dash! turned out to be only 3,670 lines of code total, which is incredibly small considering the incomplete GameMaker game I created over a year and half ago was about 4 times as many lines of code as that! (GameMaker is also a “rapid application development” tool). Based on the examples I’ve seen of Objective-C when I was looking through the online tutorials before discovering Corona, I know that if I would have remade Doodle Dash! using Objective-C, the lines of code would have been exponentially greater than 3,670.

Based on my experience in programming, I’d have to say that 3,670 lines of code would normally produce a small, simple program that would most-likely be nothing more than a demonstration. Instead, with Corona, 3,670 lines of code produced a full-featured game that is selling in the App Store right now and is getting 5-star ratings by everyone who has decided to submit a review.

Specifically speaking, what were the key features of Corona that allowed you to be so quick and still make a quality game?

First, it’s the fact that with Corona, you program in the Lua language which is 100 times (if not more) easier to learn than Objective-C, so that alone boosts development time. Despite it’ simplicity, you don’t sacrifice performance, so it just makes sense (whether you’re familiar with Objective-C or not).

Second, the amazingly fast Corona Simulator is a key feature that allowed for super fast development. Since Lua is a scripting language, I can modify the code and see the changes instantly in the simulator at the push of a button (without having to wait for code to compile and all the other stuff that goes along with developing iPhone apps with Xcode and Objective-C).

I come from a web development background where things work in a very similar manner: you write the code and click refresh in your web browser. With Corona, instead of using a browser, you use the Corona Simulator… not much difference there.

So, out of the box, everything seemed very familiar to me, and that is what ultimately allowed me to develop my game so quickly.

So, I’m assuming you’re now an “exclusively Corona” developer after that whole ordeal?

Absolutely! In the relatively short time I’ve been using it, Lua and Corona have become my development language and tool of choice — even over PHP which I have been a  huge fan of for years.

And here’s another reason why: in the future I plan on porting most (if not all) of our iPhone titles to Android, so I’m excited that with Corona I’ll be able to use the same code to create Android versions of my apps when I’m ready to.

If I never discovered Corona, I’d have my slow GameSalad-made version of my game still in the App Store and would probably still be reading that Objective-C book. I’d also never have considered porting any of my apps to the Android platform in the future if I would have gone the Objective-C route.

Speaking of the future, what’s next in the pipeline for you?

Right now, version 1.2 of Doodle Dash! is in the App Store “waiting for review” with even more features and improvements coming, and we’re about half-way finished with our next game. We also have more games on our roadmap, which we will be pursuing development on in the near future. Corona allows us to focus on gameplay and the quality of our apps instead of spending so much time on the technical aspects of things, which is why we’re able to produce high quality games at such as fast pace.

Are there other features in Corona that you’re looking to utilize for your next project that you didn’t get a chance to implement with Doodle Dash! ?

I plan on taking advantage of the new “Network Save Card” OpenFeint feature in our next title (which I didn’t implement in Doodle Dash!). We also have a simulation game on our roadmap (which I’m very excited about) where I plan on taking advantage of the WebPopups and networking features to make the game more “social” by using my existing PHP knowledge and allowing players to create “profiles” and exchange items via an external web server from within the game.

I’m sure as we make more games, I’ll be taking advantage of just about every feature the Corona SDK has to offer

Well, we’re looking forward to more of your creations.
Keep us posted, and congrats on making DoodleDash! today’s OpenFeint “Free Game of the Day!”

Team Ansca, composed of Gilbert Guerrero and Chia Hwu made an app with Ansca Corona SDK in 6 hours of actual development time at iOSDevCamp 2010. The idea for DIYbuddy came about because Gilbert has been working on DIY projects at home and wanted a way to easily annotate photos of his projects.

The app allows you to take a photo with your iPhone, add lines for measurements and text. You can also save the annotated image to the iPhone Camera Roll and email from your phone. On the iPad, you can annotate photos in your Photo Library, save the image and email from an email program. We think this is a useful tool for anyone doing construction projects, home decorating, and Burning Man art collaborations.

The entire app was written by Gilbert, who did not have a single line of code written until Friday at 9 pm. He had a working prototype on our iPhone AND iPads by noon on Saturday that would draw basic lines and rotate a photo. Chia provided marketing and moral support only, she did not code or create any graphics. By 1 pm Sunday we had an useable app that we showed to the crowd at iOS Dev Camp on both devices.

If you want to see how it works, we made the source code and assets freely available on GitHub.

Hundreds of iPhone and iPad developers are gathered at PayPal’s Town Hall this weekend to make mobile applications.

Team Ansca Hard at Work

Ansca sent a team to develop, we’re on course to have three applications in the final judging on Sunday. Keep up with @ansca progress on Twitter- and come by to say “Hi” if you are here! We have already met Alex Mostoufi from Unicorn Labs who has been showing us the new applications they are writing with Corona.

Come see us demo tomorrow August 22, 2010 from 2-6 pm if you are in the San Jose, CA area! The demos and awards ceremonies are open to the public.

The App Store has chosen the Corona-made Shaken, Not Stirred app for its “What’s Hot” list today, perhaps in anticipation of the winding down summer cocktail season!

Shaken, Not Stirred — created by Bamboudesign — allows users to search for their favorite cocktail recipe by spirit, color, flavor, or theme. If you’re in the mood for a surprise, you can even use the iPhone’s “shake” function to get a random recipe! Beautiful, full-color photos of each cocktail allow aspiring pocket-bartenders to spot-check their concoctions for glass type and garnish choices before serving them up to family and friends.

You can download Shaken, Not Stirred over at the App Store. Remember to enjoy responsibly!

A couple weeks ago, we blogged how smartphone sales were growing in the U.S. and worldwide, opening up a larger market for mobile apps and gaming. Well, it seems like this is especially true across the Pacific!

Earlier this week, the new iPhone 4 went up for presale in South Korea. The resulting avalanche of preorders (130,000 in 13 hours!) crashed the servers of KT Corp., the Korean iPhone carrier. By comparison, the previous iPhone 3GS presold 60,000 units on its first day in Korea late last year.

Even though these numbers barely compare to U.S. iPhone 4 preorders from this past June, (600,000 on the first day, which also crashed servers) they illustrate the mobile market that is emerging in the Far East. In fact, a quieter announcement last week by Korean-HQ’ed Samsung revealed that its Android-based Galaxy S smartphone has topped 800,000 sales in Korea in under two months.

Back in May, Japan saw the iPhone becoming its best-selling smartphone, comprising of a staggering 72% of all smartphones sold in the country. (head nod to Ansca Mobile Japan)

And then there’s China! The global economic powerhouse finally will permit WiFi-enabled iPhone 4 and iPad sales to its 2 billion-strong population next month. Before this month, Chinese regulators only permitted iPhones to be sold sans WiFi, and subsequent sales were pretty disappointing. However, a WiFi-enabled iPhone 3GS was launched in China earlier this this month, and sold out in the Beijing Apple Store within its first 24 hours.

At this very moment, Asia is the mobile market to watch. Expect us to follow-up on this blogpost next month, after the iPhone 4 hits shelves in China — we already have a picture for that!

Robert Stenzinger likes a couple of things: playing guitar and making games. With Corona, he says he can somewhat do both! Below, he details why he feels Corona is the best option for creating graphic/sound-heavy games or, as he calls them, “games that feel good to play.”

Stenzinger’s most recent example of this, Guitar Fretter, is now available in both the App Store and Android Market.

My development background began in 2nd grade. I was in a class where we were taught BASIC and foundational computer concepts such as the idea of literal and deterministic behavior which was taught to us via the classic “tell me how to make a peanut butter sandwich” exercise. The teacher did a great job with the class and left an impression on me that, if you work hard at it, you can make computers do cool stuff. During my formative years, I spent a considerable amount of time with friends playing video games and trying to program our own video games. Actually, I started my first game development company in the early 90′s. It was a learning lab, garage band-style company I did with friends. Although we did not finish our game, we learned a lot and we became the expert creative computer types that corporate America needed in the 90′s.

It was a far easier path to make a living with computing skills then with visual art and music abilities. I never let go of the idea of making games and, more often than not, I’ve been working on some creative computing project. Earlier this year I released my comic-focused CMS platform called Comicaster. It’s open source and over at Google code if you’re interested in checking it out. I use it to power my web comic website, ArtGeekZoo.com.

I often joke that I now consider myself a reformed enterprise architect. Over the years, I’ve programmed in several languages on several platforms: .NET / C#, SQL, JavaScript, Python, and Action Script. I have developed everything from basic web pages to rich UI web pages to games to UI widgets to Flash to databases stored procedures. Most recently, I’ve been studying and building with Lua. It fits really well with my interests and style of programming – it’s a lot of fun, it’s flexible and it’s easy to play with. I have to say Lula has now joined the list of Python, JavaScript, and ActionScript 3 as my preferred languages.

You were able to launch Guitar Fretter in both the App Store and Android Market simultaneously. I assume that Corona has a special place in your heart because of that?

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to target Android in addition to the iOS. However during the entire development life cycle for the first release I focused on just the iOS. All the way up to submitting Guitar Fretter to the iTunes app store, I hadn’t touched the Android simulator and didn’t even have the most recent Android SDK installed.

The morning after submitting Guitar Fretter to the iTunes app store I was on my way to an Iron Maiden concert in Chicago. It was really bugging me that I hadn’t completed the Android version yet. While the concert was awesome, the Android version was weighing on me throughout the trip. I was wondering how difficult or easy Corona was going to make this for me. I’m a huge believer in cross-platform development, which means I’m also all too familiar with the hiccups and glitches often involved in porting across platforms. It can require an immense effort and study trying to figure out things that are not documented very well. That was my mindset when I started to work on the Android version.

In reality, it was very easy to port to the Android platform (thanks Corona)! It was such a relief and it seemed almost too good to be true. Only two tweaks were needed. The first was getting the right settings for proper app scaling and the second was converting the sounds to the Ogg format. So yeah – I’d say Corona has a special place in my heart! Actually, Guitar Fretter was live in the Android Market a few days before Apple completed its review process and published Guitar Fretter into the iTunes store.

Guitar Fretter seems to be not just graphically rich, but also quite demanding from a sound perspective. (precise notes/sounds triggered by each fret, etc.)  Did Corona expedite the process in creating this complex of a playing interface?

Thank you, I hope the graphics do come across as rich and engaging. It was my hope that the whole package — graphics, game play and sound — create a playful action puzzle game that, at its heart, is a system for memorizing the notes on a guitar fretboard.

Two things that really expedited making Guitar Fretter‘s fretboard user interface were the ui.lua library and the Corona documentation. The ui.lua library provided a great example of how to handle touch events and the overall event lifecycle. The Corona documentation clearly demonstrated how to play short sounds in a resource-efficient manner (via media.playEventSound). This was critically important since I needed Guitar Fretter to play any one of about 60 different sounds at any moment.

The final file sizes vary a little by platform due to the Ogg format on Android taking up less space than AIFF on iOS. With about 60 sound files that difference adds up quickly. The iOS version is about 15 meg and the Android version is 6.2 meg. Though once I upload the Android version to the Market it becomes about 12 meg due to the copy protection that gets added.

Did you hit any other roadblocks during the making of Guitar Fretter? How was Corona able to help you overcome those?

Guitar Fretter started life as a prototype in HTML 5 using JavaScript and the canvas object. The early version was running great in desktop browsers but, no matter how much tuning and optimizing I did, I couldn’t get it to run efficiently on portable devices. I did everything I could to squeeze performance out of that prototype. I got rid of all the external JavaScript libraries it was using such as JQuery and RaphaelJS. In the final iteration, I targeted the WebKit browser and how it supports CSS animation which does seem to have some hardware acceleration that was faster than motion via timer loop — but it still wasn’t enough.

As an experiment, I downloaded the demo of the Corona SDK and started to port my prototype. From very early on it was obvious that the Corona SDK made more of a portable device’s power available to me. It looked like it could handle the full implementation of Guitar Fretter. Corona has provided a platform that meets my needs as a developer, that fits my programing style, and can effectively target multiple platforms while retaining good performance. It allows me to create games that feel good to play — like Guitar Fretter!

So, what’s coming next from you? Do you plan on using Corona for that too?

Well, I have designs for two additional mobile games that I’ll definitely be building with the Corona SDK. I’ll have more to share on those games in the near future. In addition to that I plan to build a mobile comic viewer in the Corona SDK that will integrate with some new interactive comic features for Comicaster (that comic focused CMS I mentioned earlier). You can be sure I’ll be looking into what’s happening with Corona Comics when I get started on my mobile comics viewer. Recently, I finished my first print comic, it’s the first two seasons of my web comic, Art Geek Zoo (AGZ). Check it out and you will notice the character designs for Guitar Fretter come from a special set of AGZ comics called “AGZ Mini”. I make a habit of weaving my creative interests together — I think that’s what has always attracted me to making videogames.

Glad to have you stick around for more Corona rollouts. Thanks a lot, Rob!

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Doodle Dash! by Beebe Games

In Doodle Dash!, you guide a cute blue monster named “Dash” through the Doodle forest to collect as many gems as you can before getting caught by the monsters. You’ll wade past evil flying bunnies, bombs, and fat cyclops as you collect gems and yellow stars (which Dash hasn’t quite decided if he likes or not).

Guitar Fretter by Stenzinger Software

Guitar Fretter is an exciting action-puzzle game! Not only do you learn the notes on a 6-string guitar while you play, but the action gets intense as you solve each level, unlock all the strings, and earn huge bonus points for full-matched frets and full-matched strings. Can you defeat the Minions?

Star Poker + by Erin Lin

Star Joker Plus is a video poker game where the Joker is a wild card that can be any card in your hand! Bring the tables to your pocket with this nifty little game, and even try your own hand in the “bounce” stage.

tappixels by William Flagello

tappixels is a simple and original game where you have to tap squares to gain pixels.

Main features include 2 main modes, 2 sub modes, 9 difficulty levels (with a timer), and the ability to share scores via Twitter.

Tumble Bee by Ben Walker

Tumble Bee is a simple, fun and addictive game that will keep you coming back for more!

Although Tumble Bee really loves to fly, he isn’t the best at it. He really needs your help to stay in the air. Try to keep him up for as long as you can by tapping him. Volleying him in the air scores points on each successful tap.

URNoiseMaker v1.1.2 by Berlin Productions

URNoiseMaker comes with over 46 high-quality sound effects that can be accessed immediately at the push of a button.

URNoiseMaker is compatible with both iPhone and Android platforms. This app is modeled after the same on-air sound effects technology used by DJ’s worldwide, except for now it fits in your pocket!

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