For me, it took around a week, mostly because I had teachers at a app camp who have been using it for years.
It took me a while, maybe a month, but I still don’t know a lot
I was able to start making little test project out of the box, but it probably took me a few weeks to get a good grasp of Codea. However, I still learn new tricks and better ways to accomplish tasks!
Codea/Lua is just another programming language. There’s probably more that I don’t know about it then I do. That’s what makes it interesting, there’s always something else to learn.
The basics are quick to grasp if you have previous knowledge of a couple of languages.
I think the best way to start is don’t be too ambitious, just try and build a few simple things, like something physics (bouncing balls or some such), something touch (dragging things around, eye’s that follow your finger), something graphics (3d cube, 3d landscape surface). Once you’ve done a few nice basic things then you can start thinking about bigger projects.
I’d like to say I was up and running quickly, but you only have to look at the code for Spritely to see that, while I was able to get Codea to do things, I didn’t really “know how to code for Codea” for months. In particular, my undersanding of touch handling was ludicrously clumsy and my approach to both the draw function and local storage was horribly inefficient.
Even so, Spritely is proof that you can bludgeon Codea into something that looks like an app, even if you only have a vague notion of what you’re about.
@Mark Really? I thought Spritely was very complex and the person who made it had a very good idea of what he was doing, I guess my code is even more inefficient.
8-X
@Prynok I think in an ideal situation, you look back every six months or so at the code you were producing and say “good lord, how horrible.” If that stops happening, you’re probably in trouble. 