Codea 4+

Very impressive

Overall I’m glad I finally took the plunge - I was sceptical whether I could really produce anything without a learning curve, but in just 6 evenings (about 12 hours) I picked up enough Lua to write a reasonable “Dots” clone, including animated transitions, a pause menu and high score. This included a rewrite when I realised I wasn’t handling touch events properly, and tweaking the UI so that it works in both landscape and portrait orientations (something that the real Dots game doesn’t do).

So, creating a simple game was a relatively easy. Getting it to build back to my devices hit a snag or two. After exporting the project into Xcode and sorting out the provisioning profile, I got an error. I contacted the devs via Facebook and they responded the same day, providing a fix. The fix got me a bit further, but with another issue. I contacted the devs again and they provided another fix. These two responses took two days presumably because of time zone differences, but I pretty much got there - the Xcode iPhone and iPad simulators don’t work with Codea apps, but that isn’t a major hardship.

A nice bonus is that once you’ve got your game/app in Xcode you can edit the classes directly there, which can be helpful when debugging.

The app has lots of documentation built right in, but I can see why a novice coder would struggle. Something showing the process of going from nothing to one of the demo games would help.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your wonderfully detailed review!

We are working hard on a new version of Codea, but your suggestion for samples projects showing some more process is a great one and something we will keep in mind for future samples

Interesting and unique app - with tons of future potential!

Well, I downloaded this simply out of curiosity and I was pleasantly surprised by the level of thought and design that's gone into it. The idea of having an IDE (admittedly simple) running on iPad is a very interesting first step and makes me wonder where things like this might go in the next few years, as ARM hardware and iOS mature.

One thing I think is really missing here are some good tutorials (ideally interactive ones) for people who've never coded before. It really has the potential to be an incredible educational tool. But right now, it's a bit overwhelming for newcomers, who may not have ever encountered basic programming concepts before.

There's also no way to share projects with other users as far as I can tell. Hopefully both these issues (tutorials and sharing) can be tackled soon, as I think there's the start of something amazing here.

Amazing, Simple and Powerful

I have seen the games people have made with this and they are truly amazing. The UI is extremely user friendly and if you ever get stuck or have a question you can go to the forums and you can be certain at least one person answers it.

If you have no previous experience with lua it has a very helpful reference manual which will get you started and will hopefully be enough for you to get going with lua and make your first game. I have just started learning lua with nothing but this app and so far so good.

I definitely recommend for anyone looking to make games on their iPad and publish to the App Store.

Developer Response ,

Thanks! For a guy that isn't happy we're glad you're happy :)