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Hello, I'm Sid — Gideros Forum

Hello, I'm Sid

strancalistrancali Member
edited January 2012 in Introduce yourself
Hi everyone, I just want to pop in and introduce myself. My name is Sid and although I'm not new to programming, I am new to game development and the Lua language. Starting this February, I will have extra free time and I want to dedicate myself to learn Gideros, Corona or both. At this moment, I am torn as to which platform to start off with. I would love to stick with Gideros from the get go because I am impressed with what I'm seeing so far in such a short time. Corona has been around longer and has a wonderful community who help each other out and I see this with Gideros also.

From a newbie's perspective, if Gideros would set some time and create templates for people who are new to game development and lua in general, it would gain A LOT of users. This is what makes Ansca so popular because they make it easy. My wish is that you guys make some ready to go templates, doesn't have to be heavy, just enough to get the person start going on a project. For example, have a template for an Interactive ebook, shooter, physics, tiled etc with all the foundation code and the user can just change out images, sounds etc if they want to stick with the basic. They can learn from that and add on to it. This way, everyone starts off with the proper structure for the game/app and build on top of that if they reach that point.

I see some people on here who seems to be good at Gideros already, maybe someone can make these templates and sell them (I would definitely buy it). I just want to remind Gideros NOT to forget the new people (just starting out). Build it, make it easy and they will come.

One feature that I know developers will appreciate is iAds, I see people begging for that with Ansca from the get go but still unavailable. Anyways, I will be sticking around Gideros and Ansca to get up to speed. Please consider my request to have more tutorials (even basic ones) and templates :)

Best Regards,
Sid

Don't forget to have fun :)
«1

Comments

  • I mentioned a while ago that remembering the new guys will be a huge draw. We shall wait and see how that progresses. In the meantime it is easier than you think. Just give it a try.

    Mike

    Likes: strancali

    What would you do for your other half?

    http://www.sharksoupstudios.com
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  • Hi Sid :)

    I've recently started out with Gideros - I bypassed Corona, mostly because I didn't understand their compilation process, and Gideros's compilation is so fast and simple.

    I'm new to Lua as well, but fairly experienced with Objective C. Lua seems a very easy language to learn. There are some useful examples included with Gideros that will help you to start out. They are in the Examples folder, in the Gideros download - I think there are more examples there than appear in Gideros Studio.

    If you have some programming experience, once you have come to grips with how Gideros works, then you can write your own plugins. I expect that there will be more documentation on that eventually, but there is the example code for the Game Center plugin to dissect. I expect that as time goes on, there will be more plugins available, such as iAds. (I don't think that one would be very difficult, although there may be complexities that I've overlooked.)

    Likes: strancali

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  • Hi Sid.

    Again, great to have you here. I can see why you find C*r*na tempting. I used it before too but now I am a member of the group of developers that left this product because various reasons.

    Much more important, I find Gideros much more powerful for various reasons. Missing stuff I can add myself, it performs better for me and Atilim and Görkem as the greatest SDK creators I have meet. Don't judge Gideros by the API list alone. C*r*na lists many native LUA commands in their API. Gideros doesn't do that, but they are still supported because it is LUA. And Gideros LUA support is not crippeled. And to this, the small community we have here is very helpfull and friendly. It will take time to grow but I already love it.

    Taking about templates, I understand that you are willing to pay for them if you like them. Maybe there is a market for it. Let me know what kind of template would you like to see first and I will create one. About iAds, I will create a module for it. I have already an MobFox/InMobi plugin sitting on my harddrive, but in beta#8 something changed so it crashes now. I still have to identifiy why, so I can turn it into a framework release it. I am kinda opposed to release it as source code of what happend when Gideros released the source code to its Gamecenter plugin. If I release it commercially, the buyer would get the source too.

    Are you interested in personal teaching/coaching/mentoring too?

    Cheers
    Michael

    Likes: strancali

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  • gorkemgorkem Maintainer
    @mykyl66 @strancali Today, before Atilim's speech in a conference (twitted about that), we sat down and decided to produce templates for beginners. We started to work on these before (like 1.5 months ago) but never finished. You are doing a good job to force us to finish up with our work and release them to the public using a non-prohibitive license.

    What we'll be releasing are the following:

    1. A catapult game, like Angry Birds.
    2. An interactive e-book, mainly derived from the ebook Elephant's Bath
    3. A fruit-ninja like game, a bit modified and simplified.

    We already have (1) and (2) and they only need to be polished. For (3) we are looking for a graphic artist to draw nice vegetables for us.

    Thanks for heads up. Really appreciated.

    Gorkem


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  • How about a customizable basic vanilla game template..

    customizable Loading/Logo screen
    Basic menu system that items can be easily added/removed (options, help, about)
    Game scenes 1, 2, 3 and so on, these will be easily added and customized.

    The idea behind it would be that you can create any type of game with this template but it is simple to use and adapt/customize to your needs. I know at least for myself this would be a huge help in learning, I don't think I'm the only newb around here.. or am i? :)

    I am working on something like this at the moment for my own use but I think someone more experienced would do a much better job at it, especially if it becomes a part of the gideros package.

    @gorkem, I am looking forward to the templates, they will definitely be useful.

    Likes: strancali

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  • Welcome to Gideros, Sid :)

    Likes: strancali

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  • gorkemgorkem Maintainer
    @b83dev I'm expecting such a vanilla game template (customizable loading screen, menus, a few game scenes and so on) from @ar2rsawseen as he's very productive these days for Gideros Studio (check: http://appcodingeasy.com/) that I cannot even catch up with him :)

    You are not the only newbie here of course, there are many silent lurkers that I personally exchange ideas constantly. Some are shy, some are just writing their games without any intervention from outside - but there's a diverse set of devs in terms of knowledge.
  • @gorkem, sounds good :) how did I miss @ar2rsawseen's site, looks like a great resource.

    thanks gorkem! :)
  • I mentioned a while ago that remembering the new guys will be a huge draw. We shall wait and see how that progresses. In the meantime it is easier than you think. Just give it a try.

    Mike
    I totally agree Mike, I will give it a try :). Thank you

    Don't forget to have fun :)
  • Heads up, the Corona guys had to take the fruity sample down because of getting letters from layers.
  • Hi Sid.

    Again, great to have you here. I can see why you find C*r*na tempting. I used it before too but now I am a member of the group of developers that left this product because various reasons.

    Much more important, I find Gideros much more powerful for various reasons. Missing stuff I can add myself, it performs better for me and Atilim and Görkem as the greatest SDK creators I have meet. Don't judge Gideros by the API list alone. C*r*na lists many native LUA commands in their API. Gideros doesn't do that, but they are still supported because it is LUA. And Gideros LUA support is not crippeled. And to this, the small community we have here is very helpfull and friendly. It will take time to grow but I already love it.

    Taking about templates, I understand that you are willing to pay for them if you like them. Maybe there is a market for it. Let me know what kind of template would you like to see first and I will create one. About iAds, I will create a module for it. I have already an MobFox/InMobi plugin sitting on my harddrive, but in beta#8 something changed so it crashes now. I still have to identifiy why, so I can turn it into a framework release it. I am kinda opposed to release it as source code of what happend when Gideros released the source code to its Gamecenter plugin. If I release it commercially, the buyer would get the source too.

    Are you interested in personal teaching/coaching/mentoring too?

    Cheers
    Michael
    Hi Michael,

    Thanks for the welcome! Yes Corona is very tempting because of the vast amount of tutorials and templates. I noticed that you can't even type the name Corona so I'm guessing it must have been a big blow out. I hope all is good with you :).

    Regarding templates, yes I think there is definitely a market for this. If you make the templates, I will buy (I'm sure others will too). Maybe the first one should be a physics type with single touch game play? I think as far as plugging goes, please make iAds a top priority, maybe Gideros team should jump on this as a marketing tool to one up on Ansca. I'm up for the personal teaching, let me knwo what you have in mind :).

    Again, with the little amount of time on this site, you have been very helpful to me and as I see, many others..... THANK YOU!

    Sid

    Don't forget to have fun :)
  • Hi Sid :)

    I've recently started out with Gideros - I bypassed Corona, mostly because I didn't understand their compilation process, and Gideros's compilation is so fast and simple.

    I'm new to Lua as well, but fairly experienced with Objective C. Lua seems a very easy language to learn. There are some useful examples included with Gideros that will help you to start out. They are in the Examples folder, in the Gideros download - I think there are more examples there than appear in Gideros Studio.

    If you have some programming experience, once you have come to grips with how Gideros works, then you can write your own plugins. I expect that there will be more documentation on that eventually, but there is the example code for the Game Center plugin to dissect. I expect that as time goes on, there will be more plugins available, such as iAds. (I don't think that one would be very difficult, although there may be complexities that I've overlooked.)

    Hi Caroline,

    Thank you for the welcome, I'm beginning to feel the love :). Yes, I will definitely stick around and try to get going with Gideros. Hopefully in months to come, I can be a contributor and pay it forward to others new to the framework. See you around :)

    Sid

    Don't forget to have fun :)
  • mykyl66mykyl66 Member
    edited January 2012
    Heads up, the Corona guys had to take the fruity sample down because of getting letters from layers.
    Seriously? Not sure how they could do that. Crazy crazy world.

    Mike



    What would you do for your other half?

    http://www.sharksoupstudios.com
  • @mykyl66 @strancali Today, before Atilim's speech in a conference (twitted about that), we sat down and decided to produce templates for beginners. We started to work on these before (like 1.5 months ago) but never finished. You are doing a good job to force us to finish up with our work and release them to the public using a non-prohibitive license.

    What we'll be releasing are the following:

    1. A catapult game, like Angry Birds.
    2. An interactive e-book, mainly derived from the ebook Elephant's Bath
    3. A fruit-ninja like game, a bit modified and simplified.

    We already have (1) and (2) and they only need to be polished. For (3) we are looking for a graphic artist to draw nice vegetables for us.

    Thanks for heads up. Really appreciated.

    Gorkem


    Hi Gorkem,

    Soooo glad to hear this. I hope I won't be too much of a pain when "forcing" you guys :).

    The above sounds great and I personally would love to see the e-book one to learn from. Keep an eye out for Michael, he seems like a good candidate for team members when you guys grow :).

    Thank you very much for this great framework!

    Sid

    Don't forget to have fun :)
  • Welcome to Gideros, Sid :)
    Thank you Nathan! Looking forward to chatting with you sometime :)

    Sid

    Don't forget to have fun :)
  • gorkemgorkem Maintainer
    @mikehart indeed - our template doesn't look like Fruit Ninja. Thanks.
  • @strancali,
    I know a few developers on the forums from the Mexican beer framework, I was the person responsible for the Ambassador Program and supposedly their Developer Evangelist. I have infact introduced quite a few good developers over to Gideros because I felt that they needed a platform that would let them express themselves not stifled. Michael Hart is one very good example, he is a wonderful developer, he has been involved with quite a few frameworks starting from variants of Basic to Lua and he is also authoring a book on Monkey.

    The point here is that Lua language is a wonderful platform, it offers quite a few advantages and Gideros have tried not to limit the framework where as the Beer Framework is limited in many ways. It is easy because they let you only do so much. It's like a calculator with 0-9 keys and just a + button. It's simple, you can add numbers, now when you have the additional keys with functions and programming, etc, it gets complicated, right? Same thing, because Gideros is non limiting, it might seem a bit complicated to the beginner.

    Atilim and Gorkem are both quite passionate and have a response to queries within 24 hours, BTW, Ansca charges for that, the Free answers that you get are from the Flower Children aka Groupies or the community of developers that actually help others. I can tell you this best as I have more insight into that process and I have been one of the community member that used to help out.

    The two main reasons that got me to stop were
    1. The attitude of the ansca employees on the forums, as if they owned the forums and policed every message.
    2. The fact that developers helped out other developers for free where as Ansca would charge for the same and would impart partial information about their API's or change them.
    There was however a third reason too, some of the free members called test driver aka kids were quite disrespectful and expect that they need to get code or solutions as a right.

    Anyways, that's not the point, the point is that though Gideros is a bit different to the C Framework, you have to remember that both work with Lua, have an OpenGL engine and work on mobile devices iOS and Androids. So though they are different, they are also the same underneath it all.

    I did ask about templates as many of the users migrated from GameSalad at the time and they were used to pay for templates, but after being used to the FREE model, they did not want to pay for anything anymore.

    With the plug-ins SDK, there could be more controls so as to say that can be introduced with Gideros that can be added as a static library which was not possible with the other, so I foresee a marketplace for Gideros controls soon.

    The only question is will users be ready to pay $10 and upwards for those controls? Bearing in mind that it would save you hours of work on your own and it would be atleast about 2 hours of the developer's time creating them, which could be worth anything from $30/hr upwards.

    Likes: strancali

    twitter: @ozapps | http://www.oz-apps.com | http://howto.oz-apps.com | http://reviewme.oz-apps.com
    Author of Learn Lua for iOS Game Development from Apress ( http://www.apress.com/9781430246626 )
    Cool Vizify Profile at https://www.vizify.com/oz-apps
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  • Thanks @OZApps , I've taken my decision to switch mostly on technical reasons, but I see there are more hard facts behind, and I'm feeling even better now, the time used to port over an almost finished project (as small as it is) was well worth it!
  • @OZApps

    Like pmanna, I understand a little more now regarding why some of you guys jumped ship. I personally have no problem with Ansca but I can see on their forum where some people were getting upset. One topic that sticks out to me was iAds. I do not understand why they would not open that up for developers. I know the fill rate maybe less but they have quality advertisers. It's like comparing Google Adsense to smaller 3rd party ads company. I think I read on another thread here that Atilim mentioned you can already ad the iAds within xcode.

    I am really impressed with Gideros on how they have everything down RIGHT in such a short time. I love how I can build on my own in xcode. I love how the SDK has a built-in IDE with Gideros autocomplete codes. I am anxiously waiting on new features but most importantly, I need to know how to start from the basic. This is the reason why I am so tempted to go with Corona (just look at learningcorona.com, filled with tutorials, examples, templates etc.

    Regarding the plugins and the $10 price point. I think it is a fair price and I know I would pay for it. The ones who don't can spend a few hours coding it but I know there are many people who will buy it. Maybe you can contact developers who made the 3rd party tools to expand their customer base and support Gideros.

    Looking forward to learning from you guys!

    Sid
    Don't forget to have fun :)
  • Yeah there were quite a few reasons to leave thta ship. But lets not turn this into an anti AM debate. Their CEO has bashed quite a few other SDK/tool developers over there. We are much better than this.

    The 3rd party template/tutorial/tool stuff will come. It simpy takes a little time. But we already have some great talented people here which makes me even more positive about the future for Gideros Studio.
  • Sid, I agree here with Mike, let's not treat this like is a Mac better than a Windows PC type debate. Not that you are, but the fact behind all of this was not leaving the ship. I just created an app for a client that hit the top 50, it's called ZDay Survival Simulator. Now as a developer I have to use what the client wants, I can make suggestions, but not dictate. I also have a blog which started off more so for learning how to do stuff with Lua based frameworks. There are a couple of articles that articulate the risk of the rapid changes that can affect developers, specially given that the compilation is a remote process, there are Dashboard add-ins that kind of dial home providing information on the use of the app back home to AM.

    The point is that the open structure of Gideros and the ability to add your own plug-ins (if you can) or purchase functionality from the developers that will soon have plenty of plug-ins available, makes is a worthy option. The quick deployment for testing, and the ability to compile your own app can make it easy or difficult.

    There are some really rad features that are planned for Gideros, as per my discussions with Atilim and he has been helping out on the same. I am working on a compatibility layer library that will allow you to port your app from the beer framework to Gideros without any issues. This is still in development between the client projects, the way it will work is start a new project, drop your assets and code from the other framework into this project, hit run and it will work. The first stage of dealing with graphics is tested and working quite fine. In fact there are some additional functionalities added that will provide more features. So there will be no more loss in migrating over to Gideros and you can add plug-ins to add additional functionality.

    Here's to mobile development and having fun in the process...
    twitter: @ozapps | http://www.oz-apps.com | http://howto.oz-apps.com | http://reviewme.oz-apps.com
    Author of Learn Lua for iOS Game Development from Apress ( http://www.apress.com/9781430246626 )
    Cool Vizify Profile at https://www.vizify.com/oz-apps

  • There are some really rad features that are planned for Gideros, as per my discussions with Atilim and he has been helping out on the same. I am working on a compatibility layer library that will allow you to port your app from the beer framework to Gideros without any issues. This is still in development between the client projects, the way it will work is start a new project, drop your assets and code from the other framework into this project, hit run and it will work. The first stage of dealing with graphics is tested and working quite fine. In fact there are some additional functionalities added that will provide more features. So there will be no more loss in migrating over to Gideros and you can add plug-ins to add additional functionality.
    This will be a great thing for Gideros.
    Don't forget to have fun :)
  • gorkemgorkem Maintainer
    +1. Looking forward to seeing this feature. :)
  • SergeykaSergeyka Member
    edited January 2012

    3. A fruit-ninja like game, a bit modified and simplified.

    We already have (1) and (2) and they only need to be polished. For (3) we are looking for a graphic artist to draw nice vegetables for us.

    I can not draw. There is a saying in Russia "if long tormented something will" (translated by google translate. I hope it is clear.) For 5 hour to get something like a watermelon =) However, if you like, you can turn this fruit into the game examples. I'll make your desired size and will remove watermark.

    p.s. Thanks to google translate. My English is even worse =)

    Big image:
    http://imageshack.us/f/192/waterm1.png

    Small image:
    watermelons_small.png
    36 x 76 - 6K
    Sorry for google translate...
  • Is there any criticism of or all so terrible? :D
    Sorry for google translate...
  • Hey Sergeyka, no it's not terrible. Looks good! :-bd

    Likes: Sergeyka

    Don't forget to have fun :)
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  • gorkemgorkem Maintainer
    Looks nice. :)

    Last week Mike has prepared a set of vegetables and fruits and donated for the template. Thanks Mike. \:D/
  • @gorkem have you found an artist for the fruit-ninja sample?

    If not yet, can you list down / describes your requirements for the vegetables that needs to be drawn? I'll see if my artist can help. I want to have some contribution to the community :D
  • Looks nice. :)
    Last week Mike has prepared a set of vegetables and fruits and donated for the template. Thanks Mike. \:D/
    @gorkem @strancali Thanks =)
    Then I use a picture as avatar =)


    Likes: gorkem

    Sorry for google translate...
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  • Ah, sorry, I didn't see the last post from @gorkem about artwork for fruits, so it's all done :)
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