Hi folks!
I have enjoyed working with Corona SDK, but as a PC user, i’ve been a bit miffed that their Composer GUI - visual editor - has only been developed for Mac users and they have no plans to release a pc version in the foreseeable future - according to a forum reply from their moderator.
I was testing Unity a couple of years back, but now that version 5 has arrived and is 100% FREE for game developers who earn less than $100K pa, it seems like a no brainer that Unity is the way to go. Their 2D feature set seems to be addressing all corners and the dominance of Corona and other 2D engines has been degraded.
I would like to know if anyone else has jumped ship from Corona SDK to Unity and if you’d be willing to share that journey with pros and cons.
Many thanks
Hey,
I tested Corona SDK some time, then I started using Unity after I read an interview with some developer who worked in company then started to be an indie. He said that Unity is quite easily to learn and has a lot of power to create something cool.
Advantages Unity over the Corona ( for me):
- I prefer using C# than Lua
Unity has got a strong GUI. Corona has got GUI ( beta) only for Mac. GUI from Unity is free and you had to buy pro version of Corona to using their GUI.
( I bought Level Director ( its not official GUI for Corona) but Unity GUI has got much more options and its much more developed )
- Asset Store.
- Unity is also free ( for developers who earn less than $100K pa)
- You can learn Unity watching videos ( and this library is huge + many videos on the youtube)
My fulltime job and first game engine was Corona SDK until about 1 year ago. After not being impressed with any type of visual tool in Corona (at that time I thought notepad was our only visual tool for game engines lol), their composer was a newer feature that was absolutely horrible HORRIBLE to deal with. had memory leaks left and right 24/7 with bugs 24/7, and I had serious problems with changing scenes and black lines between tiles. Any new feature I added in Corona would push my fps down to 2-5 every single time, and would spend days getting it back to 30fps…The only good thing with corona SDK was MTE (Million Tile Engine ) which was amazing to work with but the creator of that moved to unity and gave up on it. I tried to support it for some time and help people but it was a pointless cause. Even the MTE had some issues, but it was the only useful tool to use with Corona and made it 10x better.
I finally moved to Unity after it went free, and have never looked back since. The visual editor is AMAZING vs notepad lol. I never have fps problems or memory leaks, and C# is way better lol. Easier to make games with a visual tool where I can see all my variables. Also there is a PAUSE feature and allows you to slowly go through things or change variables at any time, while Corona cannot do any of this! It’s just much easier to work with and feels better overall…
Thanks mk22 and Azmar. I was a bit intimidated with C# a year or so ago. But after having brushed up on some non-game related development and teaching myself PHP and trying to get a better grasp of Javascript, C# doesn’t seem so hard anymore. Variables, functions and loops are all pretty universal in programming languages. I am just sorry i didn’t stick with Unity the first time i discovered it. But it was a crippled trial back then and Corona looked like the best 2D option.
Today, i am simply amazed at the ubercool IDE of Unity 5 and so nice to be able to drag assets in and have granular control with sprite animations. Being component based also seems very designer friendly. I am just perplexed that Coronalabs could be so indifferent about PC users not having access to the Composer GUI and refusing to develop for pc, but if it really as bad as Azmar says it is, seems like i’m not missing much.
Appreciate your reply guys. 