Corona SDK

What do you like best?

Beauty of corona is its simple API, although i was new to lua i was able to pick it up in couple of hours. The api itself was so simple that i was able to make prototypes really fast. The tool itself was built with developers in mind, it is code first meaning "no daunting configurations or clunky IDEs that you have to get acquainted with.". All you need to get started with corona sdk is a text editor.

It is truely cross platform with single code base. You dont have to have any experience in Android studio or Xcode to port it to IOS or Android, all the heavy lifting is done by the tool.

Advantages of corona:

Simple api

Lua is easy to learn

Games run without any lag on all platforms

Very active community

Very good and clear documentation

Tool itself is very simple and all the heavy lifting is already done by corona folks.

Almost forgot to add this, its free you can actually make a full fledged game and publish it to all platforms without paying a penny. Unlike unity where they will put a splash screen saying 'made with unity' for free version.

App size will be very small

What do you dislike?

Disadvantages:

It is 2D engine and you can also make 2.5D, so incase if you want to make a 3D game you have to move to a new platform (unity, unreal etc)

No graphical editor(i personally dont like graphical editors), there was somework done on this and a beta graphical editor was released but had lot of glitches.

Not many 3rd party tools

No asset store (like unity asset store)

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If all you want to do is a cross-platform 2D game you should do fine with corona SDK.

It supports almost all mobile platforms with support for windows and mac (native pc support) in beta.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I make 2D mobile game with Corona SDK, so far it has been a very useful tool, given how fast i can prototype to get a prototype running.