Around the middle of last year I decided to try making an action RPG in Corona SDK. I was frustrated with some of the tools I was using but stuck with them due to familiarity. One big issue I had with Corona is the lack of tilemap support. When I developed Mega Hasan I used a tilemap library for Corona called Dusk. It worked well enough out of the box but it was hard to modify any of it’s behavior due to lack of documentation. If I wanted to do anything beyond the basics I would need to make questionable edits to a very large and scary code base.

I guess this is technically old news but I released two of my mobile games on Steam a few weeks ago. It was much harder than I expected to port the games to desktop. I actually didn’t intend to do it at all. I was just trying to update the branding from Coolcodez to Cold & Old and I ended up giving myself tons of work to do.

I’ve spent the past month or so converting Above Earth and Mega Hasan into desktop games. At one point I was going to release the Mac version of these games to the Mac App Store but then I realized nobody really searches for games there. It made much more sense just to focus on Steam since that covers both PC and Mac games and is much more popular platform.

I’ve been working with Corona SDK for a few years now. I have always written my code using Sublime Text with the Corona plugin. My challenge with writing code in Lua has always been organization. It’s so loosely typed and you really have to keep track of the scope and naming of your variables.

Every time I make an app I fumble around with these things until eventually I hit the right combination and I can finally, finally deploy the app to my phone or app store.

Once in awhile I get inspired to dive back into game dev and the coolcodez name felt a bit stale. I decided to give my fake company a new name and a new website.