Hello Everyone

antix

Hi all, I'm Cliff from New Zealand. and I have decided to try and make a living by producing quality apps for Android. Mid May I am going to live in Rarotonga for four months. This will be challenging because the internet there is pretty bad. So I'm preparing and getting everything I need to be able to develop there. During this four month period I aim to have at least one app complete and possibly published. I have evaluated three development platforms so far, Corona, Marmalade Quick, and Gideros. on each platform I created the same app, a simple 2D right to left scrolling game template.

CORONA: I quite liked Corona (once I ditched the terrible editor for ZeroBrane). Got myself the "Million Tile Engine" and man was that cool! However having to compile across the internet was just stupid and that won't wash in Rarotonga. support was okay too. Without Million tile Engine I was able to scroll the 63 tiles at about 34FPS

MARMALADE QUICK: Amazingly easy to pickup. Their stage system is fantastic and their documentation can be downloaded as a PDF file on demand. I enjoyed a lot about quick. The performance of my app however in Quick was just totally bad. scrolling and animating 63 tiles at roughly 24FPS just didn't cut the mustard. The forum support was pretty much non existent as well. Having to wait at least 40 seconds between clicking "run" and actually have the app start in the simulator or on the device was driving me slightly insane also.

GIDEROS: I'm finding it a bit confusing (Quick was so easy) but I'm slowly getting it. My code can be compiled locally and I can run the code on my tablet/phone almost instantly, again unlike Quick. In Gideros I can scroll 273 tiles (the whole screen) at nearly 60FPS. Now this really excites me and since most of my apps will be 2D scrolling games, this is the platform for me. The one negative thing for me is the documentation. It would be fantastic to have a printed manual, the funny web system really isn't so hot

Anyway, I'm really happy to have finally found Gideros and I'll be buying my Indie License soon. Hard to imagine such a great platform being created and maintained by so few people, fantastic job guys!

And if anybody is either in Rarotonga or visiting there between May 18th and September 24, just PM me, I'd be keen to meetup for cocktails

unlying

https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/gideros-mobile-game-development
And this old reference that was more comfortable for me on start using Gideros.

keszegh

there is no indie licence anymore i think btw, the full gideros became free when it became open-source. but you can support the next kickstarter etc. of course.

antix

Oh wow, free huh? that's even more icing on the cake so to speak

Thanks for the book link, I'll try to get a preview however before purchasing it.

I am thinking now that maybe I will try to throw something together in Visual Basic to scrape the docs from http://docs.giderosmobile.com/

simwhi

@antix We have tried all three SDKs too. Gideros is by far the best in many ways. However, I do think that the documentation could be be much better, especially for beginners. I think this would attract more developers. The community here are friendly and helpful too. With a bit of hard work and some head scratching it will definitely pay off. We ported a very large project from Marmalade in three weeks.

Good luck!! Keep us posted on your progress. Oh, and welcome to the forum!!

Simon

keszegh

some of the money you saved by not having to buy a licence you can spend on that book as the author, ar2rsawseen, is a core member of the development and community of gideros, so besides having a useful book, you support him, which i think is a money spent well.

SinisterSoft

The books is very good btw, it also shows you how to write a game from start to finish.

antix

Hey thanks all. Have ordered the book on amazon just now so hopefully will have it in a couple of weeks. In the meantime I'll continue my experiments with Gideos

pie

@antix you already get almost anything in docs.giderosmobile.com with gideros installer to access it go to help menu > API documentation (or something similar, i am not in front of it right now... )

antix

Hey pie, cheers. I hadn't even looked there *facepalms*

I've ripped it out and started to reformat it to be a printed reference

antix

However, I have finally received my copy of Gideros Mobile Game Development from amazon and it's really neat!