Well, on my journey with mobile development, I picked up Lua for sometime. I am quite impressed with its simplicity and power. If you do not know, Corona SDK provides Lua scripting language to build applications for mobile devices. The popular Angrybirds game utilises the power of Lua.
Basically its a simple language with very minimum number of key words and language syntaxes. Anyone familiar with javascript or actionscript can start jumping into it and be productive from day one. There are variants of the installer for Mac and Windows. Some what I feel Windows installer is the best and has got its own IDE, which is on top of popular SciTE IDE.
There is a complete 2D game engine / framework for Lua named Love. With that one can instantly start creating Lua games. As Lua is simple, so as Love is. But then one gets a whole lot of goodies out of a framework. I would say a must try for any game developer.
There is a nice framework for iPhone, which uses Lua and its called WAX. This also fits Lua’s philosophy as to keep the framework simple and easy. The best part is, once you start coding in WAX, you do not have to think about memory management, which is very important and sometimes most time consuming act, while developing application with ObjectiveC.
Now that I have seen Lua’s power and simplicity, I will try that out more and more and post updates about my experiments. Here are some Lua related links for you to get used to
1. Users, tutorials and more
2. Love : 2D game engine
3. WAX : iOS development framework
4. 2D Engine A 2D game engine (I Have not tried yet)
5. Luxinia 3D game engine (I have not tried yet)
6. Lua Forge Projects, tutorials and more
7. Baja Engine A game engine (I have not tried yet)
With that I think I also have to pick up some engines and start playing with it. Overall, Lua feels just perfect as its simplicity and power. Its portable and lightweight. After all its Opensource and Free.