13 February 2015
From the Forum — Issue #59
Welcome to the latest installment of From the Forum. In this series, guest blogger Alex Jackson highlights outstanding threads from the Corona Forum. The goal is to bring attention to the most captivating, interesting, and thought-provoking discussions taking place in our very own backyard.
Please visit the forum to join these conversations or start your own!
1. Asking for friends can work!
Mapping out and effectively charting use engagement is a hot issue these days. There was a great guest blog post earlier in the week, along with many different ruminations about how best to get more users despite the density of app store catalogues.
The most important thing to remember is to make your app as accessible as possible. Allow social sharing, work in leaderboards and make sure your users can tell others about how great your app is! And this is where Facebook becomes invaluable. This tip comes from a while ago, but it’s still an interesting method to access friends of your users that also have your app installed, so that a nice social map can be generated showing who has your app installed! Check it out at the original post below!
http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/48789-facebook-request-mefriends/
2. Event listeners and their permutations
A nice conversation was recently started by a Corona developer regarding the efficacy of using several smaller Runtime event listeners, as opposed to one large Runtime function handling all of your game logic depending on different conditions.
Brent Sorrentino weighed in to say, it depends, as always, on the needs of your app. The vast majority of apps and games would be better served by smaller, more lightweight listeners being toggled on and off depending on the situation. Check out the original post to see the exact description of the mechanic.
3. Layering on the logic
When working with UI elements in our apps and games, implementing the correct perspective is arguably the most important part of development. Have a wonky set up, and you’re going to turn people off.
Layering your graphics and drop-shadows is integral to getting your app to look just right. How you go about doing that, can be a tough question. Corona lets us use display groups to shuffle objects and show some on top of others are any given time. The original post below discusses a method to accomplish this while using one large “world” display group as a control. It can easily be folded into the Composer API, so you can start using it right now. So what are you waiting for? Head over to the forum post right now!
http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/54380-dealing-with-shadows-and-layers-groups/
About Alex
Alex Jackson is an indie developer and the founder of Panc Interactive, specializing in retro-style gaming. He has created several mobile applications, enjoys long walks on the beach, pixel art, and reading the Corona forums. Contact him by email or follow him on Twitter: @pancinteractive. Check out his new game Crosstown Smash on iOS, Android, and Amazon devices!
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