Corona SDK free alternatives [closed]

Answer 1

Please note that the Corona platform is totally free now. Corona Product into page. They call it completely free! :)

Answer 2

Moai is open-source and uses Lua. I love Corona and put out an iPhone game I developed using it, but I'm planning to explore this new option for my next project.

Answer 3

We switched our studio from Corona to Moai last week. Corona is good for beginners learning Lua but has significant performance limitations that we could not overcome. It took me a week to port our Lua code over and write an extra management layer but overall we are much happier with an open source platform like Moai. I had a couple of questions on Moai which were answered promptly in their forums.

What finally pushed me over the edge was the Moai game Crimson Pirates which was #1 last week. See this video and download the game to see what I mean by performance in Moai. You couldn't write a game like that in Corona and get good performance.

Not sure if the Corona/Flash connection is a good thing. Flash may be popular but it's held in very low esteem by most game developers. When I challenged Walter on the performance issue, he didn't have any good answers. At least with Moai if I don't like the performance I can look at the code myself.

Answer 4

Moai! is awesome! It's a great alternative to Corona and if performance is a problem you can always get into the source code and address it yourself.

I've personally contributed to Moai (upgraded Box2D to the latest version). Their team was quick to integrate the changes in addition to some bug fixes. They're moving really fast and it's getting better every day.

At first I was hesitant writing everything in Lua, so I took Moai for a spin by porting on of my existing games on iPhone B.I.T.S Pinball written with my own engine in C++. I was pleasantly surprised that not only was it almost just as performant but MUCH faster to re-implement and cut way down on the code. Lua coroutines are like magical pixie dust.

Answer 5

the free open-source thing of MOAI is just a (big) added bonus to its capabilities. It's syntax is similar to corona due the fact they both usa LUA as wrapper, corona has a better number community, tutorials and DOCS are very well spreaded all over the net. Moai just lacks of them if you don't consider the examples on "samples" directory of the SDK and the few examples on their forum. Corona workflow is amazing, i can work with IntelliJ Idea and have both auto-completion on LUA (this works also in MOAI obviously) and Corona itself, plus i can run the output straight on the simulator.exe (time saving!) Moai is more for advanced people, it's updated on the fly everyday but again, you really should check it and spare some time with it, you won't regret it!

Answer 6

If you are looking for an open source alternative to Corona, as others have noted, the Moai open source game framework is making a lot of progress and a number of experienced game developers are using it. I switched to Moai in since November and it's basically an open source, high performance game engine with Lua.

Moai might not be suitable for a beginner though. I'd stick with Corona Free edition if I was just getting started, then switch to Moai when you are 100% sure you can create a good game.