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Comment by metachris | Hacker News Reader

Minor sidenote: The Corona SDK [1] is quite expensive: $350 per year to create both Android and iOS apps. There is a free, open-source alternative which is trying to do the same: Moai [2]. Also using Lua to write the game, then using wrappers for various platforms (iOS, Android, OSX, Windows).

[1] http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/

[2] http://getmoai.com/

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For anyone approaching iOS development as more than a hobby $350 is a bargain considering how much time it would take you to develop something similar on your own.

That is, of course, assuming that Corona is a good fit for the kinds of apps you want to write.

Wow, Crimson Steam Pirates is an INCREDIBLE game, that is quite the poster child for Moai, which I also had never heard of before.

I've been evaluating moai for a few weeks now and I have to say that it is a bloody brilliant bit of software engineering .. not only does it run smoothly, but its just such a pleasant set of paradigms to learn to build games - no longer do I need to sort my objects or do other things for performance, the moai runtime and object model is designed from the get-go to make it easier for the engine itself to do the optimization while the programmer fills in the content pipeline. I'm very impressed personally, and will be using it for my next game projects to release on Android, Chrome, and iOS simultaneously ..

yeah, thanks for the response. I was not aware of moai, but it looks brilliant. I also love the fact that it is open source. That is the main reason that I am rolling my own rather that using corona. Corona's lack of support for extending through c code is really a pain.

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