Codea

So I really wanted to create a game, my mum bought me this app but my first time was terrible, I was very confused on what to do to create a game, I thought this was a waste, it’s also way too expert-ish. This is a complete waste of £15 and game making, goodbye losers I’m never using this lame app again 😡

App doesn’t open on 5th gen iPad Pro 2021. Shame I was looking forward to trying it out. Refund requested….

Codea is an amazing environment. It is exciting 6 year olds who want to play with the amazing apps and demos bundled with it. It is also exciting seasoned developers who discuss how best to extend and enhance this tool in so many different dimensions. Lua is a brilliant language, deceptively simple. Codea builds on Lua and provides a fantastic environment to try out quite ambitious developments. It is, quite simply, the optimum development environment for the iPad. Bootstrapping has never been done better. Now, a couple a years and having learnt Scala I find myself drawn back to Lua because I think it is simple and holistic. Like Codea. Truly an inspired development. A fantastic vision realised. And now another few years have passed. I found this still installed on an iPad1 that I gave to my elderly mother. Codea is still working and still exports project to xCode. So impressed.

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.

Great little tool. Bought for my boy who wants to go beyond scratch. I’ll have to hold his hand on this, no doubt, as it’s proper coding. Still, something to enjoy together & I’ve really enjoyed messing about for the last few hours. Really looking forwards to holding his hand on this 😃👍👍👍👍👍

Edit / update....is now working again..? If this was not something u did it may be conflicting applications of some kind???.... Sorry.....! Has stopped responding! Work at first but now a month of so later it has stopped? Will not run /print examples Or other. The reason for my discovery is that I now need to use this application for research Please help correct this. Apologies if I have over looked something & I hope this review helps ....nice application but the way. Will pay 💰 to if needed in future!.

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.

These are my first thoughts after an hour of use but as of now I really like it. .The editor is pretty minimalist but it is easy to use and gets the job done. .I haven’t seen any inbuilt documentation for getting started in lua but there are quite a few well commented coding examples to look at. .I use an iPad Pro so I am thinking that making the editor side by side compatible would be a great help when looking at external documents (or your twitter feed). .I am playing with the voxel system and it seems to be very good. .More built in APIs would be nice but the change log suggests that the developer is on top of this. On a similar note, it would be nice to have access to something like apples UIKit, but that is a big ask.

I love this app and feel it makes it a heck of a lot easier to make an app! If anyone is reading this, it is definitely worth the £11 (or equivalent), as making an app by scratch can be very hard indeed. And thanks for the response TLL, now that the Xcode problem's out the way... ...time to put my app on the App Store!

Definitely worth the money but there isn't an easy way to add collisions in games.