Codea Pros and Cons

Hello! For my composition lesson in school last week, we were suppose to make a “pros and cons list” of something we do often, and being the addicted fan-boy I’m I decided to do one of Codea, constructive criticism is wanted :slight_smile:

Codea
Most of you have probably played a game on the appstore, Angry Birds, Candy Crusher, or Cargo Bot. Without realizing it, some of these games were made on the Ipad, and you can make one to!
Most kids like to play video games, let it be Minecraft, Angry Birds, Call of duty, etc. But now kids are wanting to make games themselves, usually with no directions where to go to make them. But thankfully, the team at Two Lives Left have made Codea, an app for the Ipad that allows you to make games, and share them on the appstore. 
Now, there are some downsides to this program, but before I scare you off, let me talk about some of the advantages, one of the major ones being you can make games for the appstore, while most app developers use Macs, Codea has the advantage where you can make games wherever you are, let it be a plane, train, road trip or another place where you usually won’t have a computer.
This software also has a clean, more word driven programming language called Lua. If you aren’t familiar with programming, a language is how you tell a computer what to do, most of them are based on numbers and symbols, but since it’s the Ipad, the makers of it have used Lua, which is mostly using words.
If you ever get stuck in your project, and need some help, it also has a forum, where you can talk to experienced, helpful people who will try to help you and your problems.
 While this may sound fine and dandy, there are some negatives about Codea, including there are few tutorials on it, while there are some good ones, most are written towards people who are already familiar with programming, mostly because this app has a steep learning curve, so even if you do find tutorials, it will take some time to come familiar with Lua.  If you ever manage to complete your first app on it, you will have to buy a Mac and a developers licenses from Apple, which if you don’t have these things at hand can, at cheapest cost five-hundred dollars. 
But if you are willing to invest in these things, and take the time out of your day to learn the app, I guarantee you, you won’t regret it. 

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Call of Duty FTW!

@Prynok that’s good! And not that your teacher knows but lua isnt that word based, no more than java can be, it just depends what you’re making. I do agree though I find im writing more words in lua in codea than normal console output programmes or wrapping lua to c++

@Luatee I’m actually my own teacher, home school can sometimes be exciting :slight_smile:

EDIT: In case for some reason you think I make my own lessons, I’m actually part of a online school, of sorts. Its complicated.

Aha, a bit like open university but a school, thats really cool! I’d imagine you could crack on with some great projects.

You know you’ve been coding too much when you start writing essay like code accidentally. There was one weekend I basically spent completely working on my app. The next day, I had to write an essay, and lots of things happened. First of all, I was expecting autocomplete for all my words, like you get for functions in Codea. Also, for making new lines, I kept putting two spaces at the end of a line just like you do on the Codea forums. Finally, every time I made a new line, I’d press return then backspace because I assumed that the word processor was going to automatically indent me. I even found various other things like random returns when I wrote an if statement, I’d use arrays for lists, instead of just commas. I’m glad I edited it before submitting it to the teacher.

@Zoyt, Really? Lol

Minecraft +1

@Prynok Looks good!

@Zoyt Happens to me sometimes

It is always good to write about something you know about. Not to be too harsh but it seems like a first draft turned in. You have a one sentence paragraph with 6 commas. The use of it instead of the object you are talking about happens too much.

Here is a quick edited example.

There are some downsides to using Codea, but before I scare you off, let me talk about some of the advantages. The first major advantage is the ability to to publish a game to Apple’s appstore. Another thing is Codea uses a programming called LUA…

@Thwapp,
I don’t speak for everyone here, but I rarely proofread my posts bc I know people will understand what I’m saying and change the few errors i make.

@Thwapp That is actually what is is. We weren’t suppose to make a complete essay, we were just suppose to make a rough draft and try to fix thread sentences and such.

@Zoyt Let me introduce you to Emacs …

@Andrew_Stacey - I assume the ones in UNIX, not the old, clunky Mac computers (I have one, it was my first computer)?

@Zoyt Yes, Emacs as in the editor not eMacs the computer.

There are versions for just about every OS.

Sorry, my mistake. I understand your assignment better. It is good start, and just getting words and ideas out is the hardest part.