App Development with Corona SDK

Our feature this week is written by John Tran of Continuous Integration, the development team behind Montelingual and Word Ball. He describes their experience with Corona SDK, the mobile development platform they used to build Word Ball. If you are curious about a fun new word game, or just interested in what you can do with Corona, then let’s check out what John has to say…

I never thought I’d see the day when our development shop would be writing iOS apps in anything but pure Objective-C.  Well, that day has come – and I must say – it came really fast.  It’s hard being an indie development shop while also having a full-time job, family, and other life obligations that keep us busy.  For that reason, it was just a mere three months ago when I thought we may need to decrease our time-to-market in order to keep our company sustainable. 

I searched for new development tools to help us speed up development time.  I found a few platforms such as Sparrow Framework and Cocos2D.  But these frameworks still involved writing your code in Objective-C.  Don’t get me wrong, Objective-C is powerful.  It’s almost too powerful.  I needed something that was simple to use and required minimal ramp up time.  It was at that point when I did what I normally do when I get stuck on some sort of app related issue:  I searched the Moms With Apps forum.  Like magic, I stumbled upon the Corona SDK by Ansca.

After reading the testimonials on Corona, I downloaded the trial version from the Ansca site along with a few sample apps.  It was so simple to set up and get code deployed to a device; I was already hooked.  I played around with the sample code for about a week or so and was amazed at the amount of lines of code it took to do something compared to what it would have taken if written in Objective-C.  What Corona provides is an extensive API that wraps many of the time-consuming tasks that all of us developers have struggled with at some point in time when developing in Objective-C (physics, audio, animations, etc).  I knew that this was the direction that I wanted to venture into.  Now came the hard part.  I needed to start thinking of a great app idea in order to take advantage of all the rich features that Corona provides.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved word games.  Scrabble was my favorite.  With the success of top hits such as Word With Friends and Scrabble on the App Store, I decided that I wanted to develop a word game.  I had brainstormed and struggled with coming up with a unique idea for an app that had not been done before.   I knew this word game had to have some sort of twist and addictive factor to it.  I’ve always loved the addictive factor of classic fast-paced and frantic games such as Tetris.  I wanted to make sure to incorporate all of these things to this word game.

After many sleepless nights the concept began to take shape.  I started prototyping by using Corona and completed it two weeks!  Yes…two weeks!  I was utterly flabbergasted.  Monte-Lingual 1 to 10 (which has less features) had taken us almost six months to develop from design to production with Objective-C.  I knew I was onto something, and I started working on the more time intensive assets such as graphics, sound and gameplay. Fast forward two months later (along with some fine tuning and extensive beta-testing), here I am introducing our new app – Word Ball!

Now comes the fancy app description…  🙂

Word Ball taps into a different genre of word building apps and games.  By providing a unique approach and gameplay, Word Ball adds a different twist to word games and demonstrates the evolution of the rapidly growing and popular gaming category.  Word Ball will challenge your word building skills in a fast paced and fun word game.  It provides a beneficial brain training exercise that allows the user to focus and think on their feet when building words as quickly as possible.  By concentrating on the letters as they shrink and bounce to keep them alive, Word Ball will test your limits by forcing your cognitive senses to react in a manner that reinforces word and pattern recognition.

Since the launch, Word Ball made the New & Noteworthy list in the iPhone word games category and was chosen by Ansca as App of the Week within just the first few days after launch.  It has also been given 4.5 out of 5 heads by CrazyMikesapps.com. 

By developing Word Ball part-time and being literally a one-man shop in a span of less than three months, this is just another testament to what is possible by using Corona.  The Corona SDK is already the most advanced mobile development platform and still is in a maturation process.  We would love to see some nice-to-have features (ad support, multi-player support, etc.) added at some point.  I’m sure that if we absolutely needed these features we would revert back to doing things in Objective-C.  But at this point, these missing features aren’t deal breakers for us and we’re not quite sure if we’ll be going back anytime soon…  😉

Per John, Word Ball will be on sale for $.99 throughout Father’s Day weekend. Enjoy!